Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

AS
RETURN (SELECT BusinessEntityID,
LastName + ‘, ‘ + FirstName AS Name
FROM Person.Person);
GO
This function returns a table of selected records and does a little formatting — joining the last and first
names, and separating them with a comma.
At this point, we’re ready to use our function just as we would use a table:
SELECT *
FROM dbo.fnContactList();
Now, let’s add a bit more fun into things. What we did with this table up to this point could have been
done just as easily — more easily, in fact — with a view. But what if we wanted to parameterize a view?
What if, for example, we wanted to accept last-name input to filter our results (without having to manually
put in our own WHERE clause)? It might look something like this:
--CREATE our view
CREATE VIEW vFullContactName
AS
SELECT p.BusinessEntityID,
LastName + ‘, ‘ + FirstName AS Name,
ea.EmailAddress
FROM Person.Person as p
LEFT OUTER JOIN Person.EmailAddress ea
ON ea.BusinessEntityID = p.BusinessEntityID;
GO
This would yield us what was asked for, with a twist. We can’t parameterize things right in the view
itself, so we’re going to have to include a WHERE clause in our query:
SELECT *
FROM vFullContactName
WHERE Name LIKE ‘Ad%’;
This should get you results that look something like this:
BusinessEntityID Name EmailAddress
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
67 Adams, Jay jay0@adventure-works.com
301 Adams, Frances frances0@adventure-works.com
305 Adams, Carla carla0@adventure-works.com
…
…
16901 Adams, Adam adam46@adventure-works.com
16902 Adams, Eric eric57@adventure-works.com
16910 Adams, Jackson jackson47@adventure-works.com
(87 row(s) affected)
Chapter 13: User-Defined Functions
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