This is basically the MSDN sample with the addition of an user-supplied separator. For some reason I couldn’t get this to deploy successfully from within visual studio I had to create aggregate manually inside SQL Server (2008).
The code for the aggregate
using System;
using System.Data;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Server;
using System.Data.SqlTypes;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
[Serializable]
[SqlUserDefinedAggregate(
Format.UserDefined, //use custom serialization to serialize the intermediate result
IsInvariantToNulls = true, //optimizer property
IsInvariantToDuplicates = false, //optimizer property
IsInvariantToOrder = false, //optimizer property
MaxByteSize = -1) //maximum size in bytes of persisted value
]
public class Concatenate : IBinarySerialize
{
/// <summary>
/// The variable that holds the intermediate result of the concatenation
/// </summary>
private StringBuilder intermediateResult;
/// <summary>
/// Initialize the internal data structures
/// </summary>
public void Init()
{
this.intermediateResult = new StringBuilder();
}
/// <summary>
/// Accumulate the next value, not if the value is null
/// </summary>
/// <param name="value"></param>
/// <param name="separator"></param>
public void Accumulate(SqlString value, SqlString separator)
{
if (value.IsNull)
{
return;
}
this.intermediateResult.Append(value.Value).Append(separator);
}
/// <summary>
/// Merge the partially computed aggregate with this aggregate.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="other"></param>
public void Merge(Concatenate other)
{
this.intermediateResult.Append(other.intermediateResult);
}
/// <summary>
/// Called at the end of aggregation, to return the results of the aggregation.
/// </summary>
/// <returns></returns>
public SqlString Terminate()
{
string output = string.Empty;
//delete the trailing comma, if any
if (this.intermediateResult != null
&& this.intermediateResult.Length > 0)
{
output = this.intermediateResult.ToString(0, this.intermediateResult.Length - 1);
}
return new SqlString(output);
}
public void Read(BinaryReader r)
{
intermediateResult = new StringBuilder(r.ReadString());
}
public void Write(BinaryWriter w)
{
w.Write(this.intermediateResult.ToString());
}
}
The SQL to create the assembly and aggregate
create assembly SqlClassLibrary from N'C:\temp\SqlClassLibrary.dll' with permission_set = safe go create aggregate concatenate ( @value nvarchar(max), @separator nvarchar(10) ) returns nvarchar(max) external name SqlClassLibrary.Concatenate go
Sample usage
select module_name, table_name, concatenate(column_name, ', ') from load_file_mapping group by module_name,table_name
