SQL Tip: Display Bogus or Fake Column in SQL
So here is the issue i was having.
I have a Union All select statement. I want to display both blogs posts and content posts in the same dataset. The problem is that these are separated into different tables.
When I’m using the dataset how do I know where the row came from? Was it tbl_Content or tbl_Blog? I need to know this if I want to point the user to the right page.
Here is the answer.
[codesyntax lang=”sql”]SELECT TOP 250 * FROM (SELECT tbl_Post.POST_ID, tbl_Post.POST_MESSAGE, tbl_Post.DATE_CREATED, tbl_Blog_Post.BLOG_ID AS ID, 'blog' AS coltype FROM tbl_Post INNER JOIN tbl_Blog_Post ON tbl_Post.POST_ID = tbl_Blog_Post.POST_ID UNION ALL SELECT tbl_Post.POST_ID, tbl_Post.POST_MESSAGE, tbl_Post.DATE_CREATED, tbl_Content_Post.CONTENT_ID AS ID,'content' AS coltype FROM tbl_Post INNER JOIN tbl_Content_Post ON tbl_Post.POST_ID = tbl_Content_Post.POST_ID) AS PostView ORDER BY DATE_CREATED DESC[/codesyntax]
I created a fake column called ‘coltype’ and set it to display blog or content in the returning Union All statement.