Passing multiple values for one SQL parameter

Question

I have a CheckBoxList where users can select multiple items from the list. I then need to be able to pass these values to my Stored Procedure so they can be used in a WHERE condition like:

WHERE ID IN (1,2,3)

I tried doing this so that its a nvarchar parameter and i pass the string 1,2,3 with:

WHERE ID IN (@IDs)

But this returned the following error:

Conversion failed when converting the nvarchar value '1,2,3' to data type int

Any help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

There's a few ways of doing it. You could pass in the parameter as an XML blob like this example:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[uspGetCustomersXML]
    @CustomerIDs XML
AS
BEGIN
SELECT c.ID, c.Name
FROM [dbo].[Customer] c
JOIN @CustomerIDs.nodes('IDList/ID') AS x(Item) ON c.ID = Item.value('.', 'int' )
END
GO

--Example Use:
EXECUTE [dbo].[uspGetCustomersXML] '<IDList><ID>1</ID><ID>10</ID><ID>100</ID></IDList>'

Or pass in the values as CSV and use a split function to split the values out into a table variable (there's a lot of split functions out there, quick search will throw one up).

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[uspGetCustomersCSV]
    @CustomerIDs VARCHAR(8000)
AS
BEGIN
SELECT c.Id, c.Name
FROM [dbo].[Customer] c
JOIN dbo.fnSplit(@CustomerIDs, ',') t ON c.Id = t.item
END
GO

--Example Use:
EXECUTE [dbo].[uspGetCustomersCSV] '1,10,100'

If you were using SQL 2008 or later, you could have used Table Valued Parameters which allow you to pass a TABLE variable in as a parameter. I blogged about these 3 approaches a while back, with a quick performance comparison.