how to replace text in a multifield value column in access - sql

Question

I've got a tablea such as below, I know its bad design having multifield value column but I'm really looking for a hack right now.
Student | Age | Classes
--------|------|----------
foo | 23 | classone, classtwo, classthree, classfour
bar | 24 | classtwo, classfive, classeight
When I run a simple select query as below, I want the results such a way that even occurrence of classtwo is displayed as class2
select student, classes from tablea;
I tried the replace() function but it doesnt work on multivalued fields >_<

Answer 1

You are in a tough situation and I can't think of a SQL solution for you. I think your best option would be to write a VB function that will take the string of data, parse it out (replacing) the returning you the updated string that you can update your data with.

Answer 2

I can cook up quite a few ways to solve this.
You can explode the mv by using Classes.Value in your query. This will cause one row to appear for each value in the query and thus you now can use replace on that. However, this will result in one separate row for each class.
So use this:
Select student, classes.Value from tablea
Or, for this example:
Select student, replace(classes.Value,"classtwo","class2") as myclass
from tablea
If you want one line, AND ALSO the multi value classes are NOT from another table (else they will be returning ID not text), then then you can use the following trick
Select student, dlookup("Classes","tablea","id = " & [id]) as sclasses
from tablea
The above will return the classes separated by a space as a string if you use dlookup(). So just add replace to the above SQL. I suppose if you want, you could also do replace on the space back to a "," for display.
Last but not least, if this those classes are coming from another table, then the dlookup() idea above will not work. So just simply create a VBA function.
You query becomes:
Select student, strClass([id]) as sclasses from tablea
And in a standard code module you create a public function like this:
Public Function strClass(id As Variant) As String
Dim rst As DAO.Recordset
If IsNull(id) = False Then
Set rst = CurrentDb.OpenRecordset("select Classes.Value from tableA where id = " & id)
Do While rst.EOF = False
If strClass <> "" Then strClass = strClass & ","
strClass = strClass & Replace(rst(0), "classtwo", "class2")
rst.MoveNext
Loop
rst.Close
Set rst = Nothing
End If
End Function
Also, if you sending this out to a report, then you can DUMP ALL of the above ideas, and simply bind the above to a text box on the report and put the ONE replace command around that in the text box control. It is quite likely you going to send this out to a report, but you did ask how to do this in a query, and it might be the wrong question since you can "fix" this issue in the report writer and not modify the data at the query level. I also think the replace() command used in the report writer would likely perform the best. However, the above query can be exported, so it really depends on the final goal here.
So lots of easy ways to do this.