Thanks for the reply. CustomerRef is unique (a foreign key taken from Customer.Ref) but unfortunately Invoice.InvoiceNumber is not - it is incremented by one for every new purchase made by...

i changed your code a little to return the actual emailid etc where it was available rather than null. Works very well. Thanks for your help.

thanks very much. wish i had asked earlier and saved myself an hour trying to work it out using table variable etc. I'll give this a go and let you...

it is true when i say i don't have any control of the application - the developer does not support (although they do allow) the use of select sql statements...

thank you for the suggestion. this led me to reading up on your inspired table-valued function incorporating the union all selects -

i can now limit the result as i wanted using:...

thank you both for your kind advice. i tried the  select top 1 from (select .. union all select ...) as A

looks good to me - did not know i...

testing this further, the access denied is due to not having the modify permission on folder. the xp_cmdshell was run through query analyser (connect with admin login) and dir *.*...

thanks, i have had a look at that. my concern is the comment "Saying that, you need to be careful how you set up your environment to make sure someone...

thanks Jeff for the help

thank you - i see the logic.

thanks very much for your help.

you guessed right! my stored procedure works when single integer is passed to the WHERE. however i guess because using IN requires a comma...

That makes more sense ... and then join to tblTel allowing multiple tel numbers for each address.

Thanks Dave, i'll give that a go.

that's exactly what i was looking for - thanks very much