SQL Server: converting UniqueIdentifier to string in a case statement

aarona picture aarona · Jun 10, 2011 · Viewed 280.9k times · Source

We have a log table that has a message column that sometimes has an exception stack trace. I have some criteria that determines if the message has this. We do not want to show these messages to the customer but instead have a message like:

Internal Error Occured. Contact US with reference code xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

where xxx etc is a guid column in the table. I am writing stored proc like this:

declare @exceptionCriteria nvarchar(50)
select @exceptionCriteria = '%<enter criteria etc>%'

select LogDate,
       case
       when Message like @exceptionCriteria
       then 'Internal Error Occured. Reference Code: ' + str(RequestID)
       else Message
       end
  from UpdateQueue

RequestID is a Guid datatype in SQL Server and does not convert to string here. I've seen some code on how to convert a Guid to string, but it is multi-lined and I don't think it would work in a case statement. Any ideas?

Answer

aarona picture aarona · Jun 10, 2011

I think I found the answer:

convert(nvarchar(50), RequestID)

Here's the link where I found this info:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187928.aspx