Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Padding an auto-incremented Int column to ten zeros

Good day gentleman,
Is it possible to pad columns of Int data type with zeros?

I currently have a primary key column of data type Int which is auto-incremented by 1. My problem is I need to pad the auto-incremented ID's with ten zeros so, 0000000009 instead of 9.

I can pad the ID's in the c# dataaccess layer, but i need to generate/store them padded in the database to allow direct reporting.

I am using Enterprise Manager and i can see a Formula field when the table is in design view, can i use this? i am just guessing here.

Any comments or pointers would be a big help.What you are discussing is a display issue. An int is, by definition, isolated from any particular display formatting. It is just a number. You could add an additional column (nvarchar) and have a trigger on inserts that populates that nvarchar() column with a string value with 0 padding.

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