ms access - Combine values from related rows into a single concatenated string value

Question

I'm trying to aggregate some instructor data (to easily show which courses an instructor taught in a semester), and up until now I've just accepted having multiple rows for each instructor. However, it would be beneficial to some business processes if I could have all of an instructor's teaching in a single row. Here is some example data (my tables have a lot more columns, but the general idea won't change much.

tbl_Instructors has:

    N_ID | F_Name | L_Name
    001    Joe      Smith
    002    Henry    Fonda
    003    Lou      Reed

tbl_Courses has:

    Course_ID | N_ID | Course_Info
    AAA         001    PHYS 1
    AAB         001    PHYS 2
    CCC         002    PHYS 12
    DDD         003    PHYS 121
    FFF         003    PHYS 224

What I want to return is:

    N_ID | First_Name | Last_Name | Course_IDs
    001    Joe          Smith       AAA, AAB
    002    Henry        Fonda       CCC
    003    Lou          Reed        DDD, FFF

I think I need to do something with selecting all N_IDs from tbl_Instructors, then returning the Course_IDs from tbl_Courses via concatenation, but that magic step has alluded me. Any help? Can I do this via SQL selects or will I need to use VB?

Answer 1

This is easy using Allen Browne's ConcatRelated() function. Copy the function from that web page and paste it into an Access standard code module.

Then this query will return what you asked for.

SELECT
    i.N_ID,
    i.F_Name,
    i.L_Name,
    ConcatRelated(
        "Course_ID",
        "tbl_Courses",
        "N_ID = '" & [N_ID] & "'"
        ) AS Course_IDs
FROM tbl_Instructors AS i;

Consider changing the data type of N_ID from text to numeric in both tables. If you do that, you don't need the single quotes in the third argument to that ConcatRelated() expression.

"N_ID = " & [N_ID]

And whenever you need N_ID displayed with leading zeros, use a Format() expression.

Format(N_ID, "000")