T-SQL While Loop and concatenation
- by JustinT
I have a SQL query that is supposed to pull out a record and concat each to a string, then output that string. The important part of the query is below.
DECLARE @counter int;
SET @counter = 1;
DECLARE @tempID varchar(50);
SET @tempID = '';
DECLARE @tempCat varchar(255);
SET @tempCat = '';
DECLARE @tempCatString varchar(5000);
SET @tempCatString = '';
WHILE @counter <= @tempCount
BEGIN
SET @tempID = (
SELECT [Val]
FROM #vals
WHERE [ID] = @counter);
SET @tempCat = (SELECT [Description] FROM [Categories] WHERE [ID] = @tempID);
print @tempCat;
SET @tempCatString = @tempCatString + '<br/>' + @tempCat;
SET @counter = @counter + 1;
END
When the script runs, @tempCatString outputs as null while @tempCat always outputs correctly. Is there some reason that concatenation won't work inside a While loop? That seems wrong, since incrementing @counter works perfectly. So is there something else I'm missing?
