Address column name through calculation

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Address column name through calculation

Author

Topic

barnabeck
Posting Yak Master

236 Posts

Posted - 2012-06-28 : 07:26:27

I need to select column-names dynamically.
The columnnames for the Items I need to address from my database are Item1, Item2,... to Item19; the number that specifies the Item is index_number.

How can I do something like

select Item+index_number ?

The data is imported data from an excel document; the document is not available anymore and the reference from the cells position to the the cell content has to be established in this way... sounds odd, but that's the way it is.

Regards,
Martin

sunitabeck
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

5155 Posts

Posted - 2012-06-28 : 07:35:03

Since you have only 19 columns, my preferred approach would be to use a case expression like shown below. You can also use dynamic SQL, but most experts on this forum would try to dissuade from using dynamic SQL if it can be avoided

DECLARE @INDEX INT = 2;
SELECT
	CASE 
		WHEN @INDEX = 1 THEN Item1
		WHEN @INDEX = 2 THEN Item2
		-- WHEN INDEX = 3 THEN Item3 -- and so on upto 19.
	END
FROM
	YourTable

sunitabeck
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

5155 Posts

Posted - 2012-06-28 : 08:15:59

Just want to mention that in my previous reply, I assumed that you have the same data type for all 19 columns. If that is not the case, the CASE expression would not work correclty.

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