Question

Suppose I have a table a with one column b and three rows(1,2,3), I would like to create a function that will return ‘1,2,3’ that would be called like this : SELECT FUNC(f), … FROM …

In other words, I have a linked table that have more than one rows linked to each rows of the first table and would like to concatenate the content of one column from the second table. In this case, it’s a list of names associated with a specific observation.

I was thinking of using a SQL function for that, but I can’t remember how… 🙁

Thanks

Answer 1

Here is an example for SQL Server:

CREATE FUNCTION ConcatenateMyTableValues
(@ID int)
RETURNS varchar(max)
AS
BEGIN
    declare @s as varchar(max);
    select @s = isnull(@s + ',', '') + MyColumn from MyTable where ID = @ID;
    return @s
end

And then you could use it like this:

select t.ID, t.Name, dbo.ConcatenateMyTableValues(t.ID)
from SomeTable t