Alter Column Name based on another field value

  • I'm not sure if I can do this.... I'm trying to change the column heading based on the value of another field.

    Something like this:

    SELECT Other AS 'Other (describe):' + [OtherText]

    FROM [TESTTABLE]

    The value of Other is "X"

    The value of OtherText is "Football"

    So the column heading would look like: "Other (describe): Football"

    The value would be "X"

    ... I know there are much better ways of doing this, just we don't have the option of changing the table format.

    The Select statement would only ever return one single record.

  • ... I know there are much better ways of doing this

    That is huge understatement. It is nowhere near good practice to store column headers in the table. :w00t:

    Bad practice aside you can accomplish with dynamic sql.

    Let's start with some ddl and sample data in a consumable format (this is a good habit for your future posts). Then we can proceed with the kludge to pull this off.

    create table #Other

    (

    Other varchar(25),

    OtherText varchar(25)

    )

    insert #Other

    select 'X', 'Football'

    declare @ColHeading varchar(50)

    select @ColHeading = 'Other (describe):' + OtherText

    from #Other

    declare @sql nvarchar(max)

    set @sql = 'select Other as [' + @ColHeading + '] from #Other'

    exec sp_executesql @sql

    drop table #Other

    Hopefully that is something that can at least get you started to make this work.

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