Question

Writing a stored procedure in MS SQL Server 2008 R2, I want to avoid using DSQL…

I would like the sort method (ASC or DESC) to be conditional.

Now, with a numeric column I would simply use a case statement and negate the value to emulate ASC or DESC…
That is:

... ORDER BY CASE @OrderAscOrDesc WHEN 0 THEN [NumericColumn] ELSE -[NumericColumn] END ASC

What is an appropriate method for doing this with an alpha column?

EDIT: I thought of a clever way but it seems terribly inefficient… I could insert my ordered alpha column into a temp table with an autonumber then sort by the autonumber using the method described above.

EDIT2:

What do you guys think of this approach?

ORDER BY CASE @OrderAscOrDesc WHEN 0 THEN [AlphaColumn] ELSE '' END ASC,
CASE @OrderAscOrDesc WHEN 0 THEN '' ELSE [AlphaColumn] END DESC

I don’t know if forcing a sort on a uniform column is more efficient than deriving numbers from sorted strings though

Answer 1

One option

;WITH cQuery AS
(
   SELECT
       *,
       ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY SortColumn) AS RowNum
   FROM
       MyTable
)
SELECT
   *
FROM
   cQuery
ORDER BY
   RowNum * @Direction --1 = ASC or -1 = DESC

Or CASE which IMHO is a bit uglier

ORDER BY
  CASE WHEN 'ASC' THEN SortColumn ELSE '' END ASC,
  CASE WHEN 'DESC' THEN SortColumn ELSE '' END DESC