sgmunson (5/6/2013)

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I'm at the point of making an assumption about what the poster meant by their most recent post. Given the technique of concatenating a series of ISNULL functions whose parameters are all strings or casted or converted into strings, it's not that difficult to eliminate a null value from causing a problem in concatenation, and you just encapsulate the entire concatenation of ISNULLs within a NULLIF and you can preserve a NULL value for the case when all the fields are NULL as opposed to just one or more but not all. The assumption I make is that when they mention the idea of having 4 to 6 fields to deal with, that they mean that they need to concatenate more than just two fields. Whether that assumption holds true or not is something the poster would have to resolve for us by posting again. Does that explain?

Phil Parkin (5/6/2013)

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sgmunson (5/6/2013)

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The number of fields that can be included in the query's use of ISNULL and NULLIF is not limited to two. You can just keep concatenating an ISNULL function, and then NULLIF the entire concatenation, and thus have as many fields as you need. They just all need to be strings, or alternately, CAST-ed or CONVERT-ed to strings.

Steve - you sound like you understand the problem - can you explain it, because I still cannot comprehend properly what the issue is? 🙂