更新SQL表列中包含的xml属性的值

Question

sqlcmd -S .\SQLEXPESS
USE Directory
    SELECT Info FROM dbo.User WHERE Name = TestACC
    SET [User Status].modify('replace value of 
    (/User/[User Status]/text())[1] with ("Activated")')
    GO

I have a database, Directory .

Table, dbo.User

In the table there are multiple columns but the two im concerned with are Name and Info .

Name contains the account username and Info has ~100 lines of xml tags for that users account preferences and settings. One of the lines is <User Status> Deactivated </User Status> or it may be set to <User Status> Activated </User Status> depending on if someone forgot to deactivate the account afterwards.

I have to change this account status probably 30 times a day by loading a GUI, logging in and changing the status through its properties. ~6 minutes per status change since the GUI loads soooo slow and there are 3 passwords on rotation to log into the GUI so its a guessing game. The GUI isnt changing any time soon so I'd rather just drop a script to either set user status to deactivated or activated.

Am I doing this right?

Answer 1

In my opinion, what could be useful here is to create a stored procedure with XML parameters.

You should mark columns in your table with input parameters and depending on the id of Users where the change occurred the value in User Status will be updated automatically.

For more details please take a look at this link TSQL: How to use XML parameters in stored procedures

Answer 2

Your problem is: You are dealing with something looking like XML, but this is not valid XML. Check the naming rules here .

An element like this is not allowed:

 <User Status> Deactivated </User Status>

You might change this to

<User Status="Deactivated"/>

Or to

<User_Status> Deactivated </User_Status>

Your code is entirely wrong actually:

USE Directory
    SELECT Info FROM dbo.User WHERE Name = TestACC
    SET [User Status].modify('replace value of 
    (/User/[User Status]/text())[1] with ("Activated")')

Besides the invalid XML you would have to use something along

UPDATE dbo.User SET Info.modify('replace value of (someXpathHere)[1] with "SomeValue"');

UPDATE

It is really annoying when developers do such stupid things. Now you have to deal with that mess. Sometimes we have to live with it...

As your "XML" isn't valid XML acutally, you have two choices:

1. Change it to XML (with string methods like REPLACE ) and deal with XML methods (and remove your changes afterwards) or
2. Deal with it as a string.

I'd suggest to try a simple

UPDATE dbo.User 
SET Info=REPLACE(Info
                ,'<User Status> Deactivated </User Status>'
                ,'<User Status> Activated </User Status>');

This approach depends on the exact writing, other usage of spaces etc would break this... You might think about some RegEx...