06 May

Automating the compare of 2 rows in a trigger

I just answered this question on StackOverflow about how to generically compare an inserted row to a deleted row within a trigger. I started by just commenting that it would be a good place to do a little code generation, but something about the problem wouldn’t let me put it down. Here’s what I came up with.

First I created a function that would return the query that would actually do the comparison. Notice that I’m comparing #inserted and #deleted rather than inserted and deleted.  This is because we don’t have access to the inserted and deleted tables when we’re running the comparison query in an exec()

create function GetChangedRowsQuery(
	@TableName				varchar(50), 
	@PrimaryKeyColumnName	varchar(50),
	@RowVersionColumnName	varchar(50) = ''
)
returns varchar(max)
as
begin
	
    declare 
	@ColumnName varchar(50),
	@GetChangedRowsQuery varchar(max)

    select @GetChangedRowsQuery = 
           'select isnull(a.' + @PrimaryKeyColumnName + ', b.' 
           + @PrimaryKeyColumnName + ') 
      from #inserted a
      full join #deleted b 
        on a.' + @PrimaryKeyColumnName + ' 
           = b.' + @PrimaryKeyColumnName + '
     where '

    declare ColumnCursor cursor Read_Only
    for select Name
          from Sys.columns
         where object_id = Object_Id('Member')

    open ColumnCursor
    fetch next from ColumnCursor into @ColumnName
    while @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
      begin
	if (@ColumnName != @PrimaryKeyColumnName 
            and @ColumnName != @RowVersionColumnName)
	  begin
            select @GetChangedRowsQuery = @GetChangedRowsQuery 
                + '((a.' + @ColumnName + ' != b.' + @ColumnName 
                + ' or a.' + @ColumnName + ' is null 
                    or b.' + @ColumnName + ' is null) 
                and (a.' + @ColumnName + ' is not null 
                     or b.' + @ColumnName + ' is not null))' 
                + char(13) + '      or ' 
          end
        fetch next from ColumnCursor into @ColumnName
      end
    close ColumnCursor
    deallocate ColumnCursor

    select @GetChangedRowsQuery 
           = substring(@GetChangedRowsQuery, 0, len(@GetChangedRowsQuery) -7)

    return @GetChangedRowsQuery
end

Next, I created a trigger.  It creates the #inserted and #deleted temp tables, get’s the query from the function, creates a temp table to hold the results.  Then it inserts the result into the temp table.  I’m just selecting the top 10 changed rows, but you could do whatever you needed to do with the changed rows at this point.

create trigger TestTrigger on Member for Insert, Update, Delete
as
begin
	
    select *
      into #Inserted
      from Inserted

    select *
      into #Deleted
      from Deleted

    declare @GetChangedRowsQuery varchar(max)

    select @GetChangedRowsQuery 
            = dbo.GetChangedRowsQuery('MemberTrash', 'MemberId', '')

    create table #Temp (PrimaryKey int)

    insert into #Temp (PrimaryKey)
    exec (@GetChangedRowsQuery) 

    select top 10 *
      from #Temp

    drop table #Temp
    drop table #Inserted
    drop table #Deleted
end

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