SQL Server String Concatenation with Null

Question

I am creating a computed column across fields of which some are potentially null.

The problem is that if any of those fields is null, the entire computed column will

Answer 1

You can also use CASE - my code below checks for both null values and empty strings, and adds a seperator only if there is a value to follow:

SELECT OrganisationName, 
'Address' = 
CASE WHEN Addr1 IS NULL OR Addr1 = '' THEN '' ELSE Addr1 END + 
CASE WHEN Addr2 IS NULL OR Addr2 = '' THEN '' ELSE ', ' + Addr2 END + 
CASE WHEN Addr3 IS NULL OR Addr3 = '' THEN '' ELSE ', ' + Addr3 END + 
CASE WHEN County IS NULL OR County = '' THEN '' ELSE ', ' + County END 
FROM Organisations 

Answer 2

Use

SET CONCAT_NULL_YIELDS_NULL  OFF 

and concatenation of null values to a string will not result in null.

Please note that this is a deprecated option, avoid using. See the documentation for more details.

Answer 3

You can use ISNULL(....)

SET @Concatenated = ISNULL(@Column1, '') + ISNULL(@Column2, '')

If the value of the column/expression is indeed NULL, then the second value specified (here: empty string) will be used instead.

Answer 4

I had a lot of trouble with this too. Couldn't get it working using the case examples above, but this does the job for me:

Replace(rtrim(ltrim(ISNULL(Flat_no, '') + 
' ' + ISNULL(House_no, '') + 
' ' + ISNULL(Street, '') + 
' ' + ISNULL(Town, '') + 
' ' + ISNULL(City, ''))),'  ',' ')

Replace corrects the double spaces caused by concatenating single spaces with nothing between them. r/ltrim gets rid of any spaces at the ends.