Nice idea.

I recently wrote some stored procedures that create hyperlinks, however there was a difference between what I did and what is described in this article.

I had to create hyperlinks to an intranet application, based upon dynamic content of the web page. The data from the database was to be used as an argument to an aspx web page.

Essentially, I used a stored procedure to pull data out of a database and then used .NET to populate the page. I had two choices as to how I displayed certain data fields within hyperlnks...

1. I could get the .NET code behind to do it on the fly. The problem with this was that if the server being linked to changed, someone would have to edit the code behind and re-compile the application. Not desireable as this is a complex application and not written using the normal Visual Studio method (Its written using Unix software development principles if anyone is interested)

2. I could get the stored procedure to output the hyperlinks directly instead of just the data field. This gets round the problem of having to re-compile the application to take account of any changes. The stored procedure is simply amended and re-run in SQL Server. This was beneficial because where I work there is a great deal more SQL server experience than there is Unix-style program development experience.

The way I did this was like this:-

Normal stored procedure snippet...

select mydatafield from mytable

Hyperlink snippet...

select 'http://myserver.net/mypath.aspx?' + 

         'myarg=' + mydatafield  as 'mydatafield'

from mytable

Simple! Isn't it?

Alastair