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POSQL select row into a string variable without knowing columns
 

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  1. POSQL select row into a string variable without knowing columns
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    <p>I am new to writing SQL and would greatly appreciate help on this problem. :)</p> <p>I am trying to select an entire row into a string, preferably separated by a space or a comma. I would like to accomplish this in a generic way, without having to know specifics about the columns in the tables.</p> <p>What I would love to do is this:</p> <pre><code>DECLARE @MyStringVar NVARCHAR(MAX) = '' @MyStringVar = SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE ID = @ID AS STRING </code></pre> <p>But what I ended up doing was this:</p> <pre><code>DECLARE @MyStringVar = '' DECLARE @SecificField1 INT DECLARE @SpecificField2 NVARCHAR(255) DECLARE @SpecificField3 NVARCHAR(1000) ... SELECT @SpecificField1 = Field1, @SpecificField2 = Field2, @SpecificField3 = Field3 FROM MyTable WHERE ID = @ID SELECT @StringBuilder = @StringBuilder + CONVERT(nvarchar(10), @Field1) + ' ' + @Field2 + ' ' + @Field3 </code></pre> <p>Yuck. :(</p> <p>I have seen some people post stuff about the COALESCE function, but again, I haven't seen anyone use it without specific column names.</p> <p>Also, I was thinking, perhaps there is a way to use the column names dynamically getting them by:</p> <pre><code>SELECT [COLUMN_NAME] FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'MyTable' </code></pre> <p>It really doesn't seem like this should be so complicated. :(</p> <p>What I did works for now, but thanks ahead of time to anyone who can point me to a better solution. :)</p> <p>EDIT: Got it fixed, thanks to everyone who answered. :)</p>
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    1. USJon Seigel
    1. USBrandi
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    1. COCould you explain what your end goal is? If we better understand that, we may be able to suggest a better solution.
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      1. USAdaTheDev
    2. COI too am curious as the purpose such a generic routine. I would not use any such solution in production code.
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      1. USThomas
    3. COMy overall goal is to track deletion (via trigger) in a database and write changes to a logfile. I want the string because I am trying to pass a row as a parameter to a DLL function (written in C#, takes row as string) that writes the deleted data to a logfile. I want a generic approach because I will probably have to write this trigger for every table in the database. The msdn page says DDL triggers don't track row deletion, unfortunately, so it seems I have to write this trigger over and over. If this is the case, I'd at least like to dynamically adjust to any changes made to the tables.
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