quote:

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Originally posted by Mr Fett

Hi all,

Apologies for posting again so soon - I've hit another snag that I can't seem to find an answer to.

To streamline some programming I'm doing, I was wondering if it was possible to "pad" a returned dataset with blank rows to ensure I always get a minimum (or set) number of rows for example, if the statement below found only 3 results, I'd get 10 rows (7 of which were blank):

SELECT * FROM customers WHERE age > 65

I found an example doing it with a stored procedure here:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Microsoft/Development/MS-SQL-Server/Q_24324701.html

But I've been unable to make it work for me!

Thanks in advance for your help

Bob

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mr Fett

Hi Madhivanan,

I'm going to be displaying this data as a HTML form - I *can* create a work around us the code but I'm looking for a cleaner more elegant solution.

Thanks

Bob

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SELECT TOP 10 *
FROM
(
SELECT *,0 as ord FROM customers WHERE age > 65
UNION ALL
SELECT '','',''....number of columns same as in above result,number
FROM master..spt_values
where type='p'
and number between 1 and 10
)t
ORDER BY ord