>The user is the arbiter, not some middle manager. I for one, always look for a single way to do things. If I am custom-hand coding every query and every line of front end code, that is not efficient.

Mike, the point I'm making - and using a bit of the Socratic method - is that people create small "factory" functions in SQL to get this kind of information.

Reading through this entire thread, this has a whiff of a general developer "anti-pattern".

I'm not referring to custom-hand coding every query. That's a straw man argument.

And yes, an I.T. manager WILL sometimes be an arbiter. Especially (to your point) of someone taking an approach that might be the very opposite of a "simple way to do things". I've seen development managers pose the very question.

Really, I'm not trying to be a pain. I'm just curious why there's a compelling reason to go through this trouble when a basic T-SQL approach works perfectly well.