Comma Separated

Following on from part 1, here is an example of using HTQL to pull data from a table on a webpage. We’ll use the Wikipedia list of most expensive football transfers as our source web page. You can check out the list here. On viewing the page and the HTML source you’ll see that the first row of the table is a header row and that the “player”, “from” and “to” columns contain quite a bit of HTML in order to provide a link to the player/team and a graphical link to their country. Our HTQL will need to cut through this to just get the data that we want. ...

A situation arose today where the key fields for an SSRS report just fitted into an A4 landscape page, but additional fields would be useful when exporting to Excel or CSV. Others seem to have had the same requirement and suggest setting the column visibility depending upon the render format. The suggestion works nicely once tweaked to cater for newer versions of Excel! Right click on the column and change the column visibility to “Show or hide based on an expression”: ...

A festive post for the twelfth day of Christmas and one way to avoid taking the decorations down for a while longer! If you have each gift from the “Twelve days of Christmas” song as an individual record in a SQL Server database table, can you write a query that returns one row for each verse of the song? Yes you can. This problem is similar to other cases where you need to flatten multiple rows into a single string. In this case for each day we want a comma separated list of the gifts for that day and all preceding days. ...