Creating Delimited Text

Abstract

You learned in the previous chapter how to take a delimited text and split it to pieces, generating rows with one piece of text per row. Guess what, just like there was a chapter on pivoting after unpivoting, here comes a chapter showing how to take pieces of text in rows and aggregate them into delimited strings. This is often much liked by users reading reports, where it is easier to get an overview if there is not a lot of repeated data in multiple rows with most columns identical and just a single column with different values. Sometimes you can do pivoting to alleviate that problem, but sometimes you just don’t have a fixed number of columns. Outputting a comma-separated string can be the answer for such cases. There are several ways you can create such delimited text, both using built-in functionality as well as functionality you create yourself.