Question

We have an invoice table. The invoice has an owner and customer, both id fields which link to a resource table. The resource table contains businesses which might have ‘child’ businesses under them. I have a query that checks if the current business is in the owner_id or customer_id like so:

SELECT * FROM invoices i WHERE @BusinessId IN ( i.owner_id, i.customer_id )

The problem I have at the moment is that I need to verify if the business or its child businesses are in the owner_id or customer_id. We have a function that returns a table containing the business ids from the resource table if I query it like so:

select business_id from  dbo.vfn_child_business(@BusinessId , 'Y')

The ‘Y’ parameter basically returns the main parent along with the child business id’s in the results (essentially looking for child businesses of a business and including itself).

I can’t figure out how to query to say

SELECT * from Invoices
where ANY OF MY RESULTS FROM CHILD BUSINESS FUNCTION IN ( i.owner_id, i.customer_id ).

I’ve tried:

... WHERE (select business_id 
           from  dbo.vfn_child_business(@BusinessId , 'Y'))
    IN ( i.owner_id, i.customer_id )

But I get this error:

Subquery returned more than 1 value. This is not permitted when the
subquery follows =, !=, <, <= , >, >= or when the subquery is used as
an expression.

Please can anyone help?

Answer 1

I haven’t tested this, but the EXISTS predicate might help here:

WITH children AS
    (SELECT business_id
     FROM dbo.vfn_child_business(@BusinessId , 'Y'))
SELECT
    i.*
FROM
    Invoices AS i
WHERE
    EXISTS
        (SELECT 1
         FROM children
         WHERE children.business_id IN ( i.owner_id, i.customer_id ))