Posted by Plamen Ratchev on 02/28/07 02:47

Seems you are looking to provide ad-hoc reporting capabilities. To avoid
hard-coding queries you would have to access the SQL Server meta-data to
retrieve information about tables and to provide options for users to pick
tables and columns. You can start by looking at the information schema views
in the SQL Server documentation. Here is one example of a query that returns
tables and columns:

SELECT c.table_catalog AS 'Database Name',
c.table_schema AS 'Owner',
c.table_name AS 'Table Name',
c.column_name AS 'Column Name',
c.data_type AS 'Column Data Type'
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS c
INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES t
ON t.table_catalog = c.table_catalog
AND t.table_schema = c.table_schema
AND t.table_name = c.table_name
WHERE t.table_type = 'BASE TABLE'

Since the table and column names may not mean much to users, you may want to
build a mapping table with descriptive names. That involves some hard-coding
and maintenance (best stored in a table that you can join easily) to update
when a new table/column is added or changed, but greatly improves the user
experience.

Next you would allow selection of columns and placing filters (the WHERE
clause of the query). A good idea is to enforce a requirement to have at
least one condition. Users tend to forget about adding filters and could
possibly dump the whole table out. At this point it is very important to
check the column type and perform verification on any parameters entered.

Last is to build a dynamic query and return the results to the user. A good
reading for dynamic queries is Erland Sommarskog's article here:
http://www.sommarskog.se/dynamic_sql.html. Pay attention to the SQL
injection section as this is very common for ad-hoc query systems.

This is a very simplified approach to what you are looking for. It can get a
lot more complex if you need to provide special operations like summary
queries, or if you decide to provide capabilities to join multiple tables.

HTH,

Plamen Ratchev
http://www.SQLStudio.com

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