check this out to help you understand.  The format of the rows in the original txt file is this

headerrow:

http://www.webfound.net/headerrow_fixedlength.jpg

maintenance rows:

http://www.webfound.net/manitrow_fixedlength.jpg

payment rows:

http://www.webfound.net/paymentrow_fixedlength.jpg

because of the variations in field length,...

THE PROBLEM:

I cannot have the same # of rows, so UNION is not going to work for me.  The end result must have certain columns for the header, maintenance, and...

I'm not sure why it's not allowing the ORDER BY like yours had

FYI...took out the aliases

SELECT  1 as col,

  mnt_HeaderID as hdr_HeaderID,

  BatchDate +

  NotUsed +

  TransactionCode +

  GrossBatchTotal +

  NetBatchTotal +

  BatchTransactionCount +

  PNet_ID +

  PartnerCode +

  Filler as...

forgot a few things

SELECT  1 as col,

  h.mnt_HeaderID as hdr_HeaderID,

  h.BatchDate +

  h.NotUsed +

  h.TransactionCode +

  h.GrossBatchTotal +

  h.NetBatchTotal +

  h.BatchTransactionCount +

  h.PNet_ID +

  h.PartnerCode +

  h.Filler as HeaderRow,

  h.PNet_ID as FilePath

FROM mnt_Header h

UNION ALL

SELECT  2 as col,

  m.mnt_HeaderID as MAINT_HeaderID,

  m.TransactionDate +

  m.TransactionTime...

not there yet, still working on it

SELECT  h.mnt_HeaderID as hdr_HeaderID,

  h.BatchDate +

  h.NotUsed +

  h.TransactionCode +

  h.GrossBatchTotal +

  h.NetBatchTotal +

  h.BatchTransactionCount +

  h.PNet_ID +

  h.PartnerCode +

  h.Filler as HeaderRow,

  h.PNet_ID as FilePath

FROM mnt_Header h

UNION ALL

SELECT  m.mnt_HeaderID as MAINT_HeaderID,

  m.TransactionDate +

  m.TransactionTime +

  m.AccountNumber...

It looks like y ou're filling in null in for fillers. I'm not able to do that in mine becasue the # of columns and length of columns vary so...

I'm trying to take what you did and try it on mine....

Also, by design, the UNION isn't giving me all columns back, just

hdr_HeaderID, HeaderRow, and FilePath

I need the rows from the maintenance and Paymetn selects also!

Well, I guess ORDER BY isn't what I want then.  I'm still not gettting Header / rows, Header / Rows combinations.  Also, I need to be able to name each...

thanks, cast will work for me later, good idea, if any of the fields change datatype and I still want to do a UNION.

disregard this post, I overlooked a bigint in one of my tables!

Thanks, although I figured it out recently.  I did not need to use fields in series.  I just added GrossGoal, InHouse, and ProjFee fields to the Data area and whatever...

well, that's a pain, I dont' want them to have to type it in, it should just pass it through.  Is there any way around this?  My other users don't...

I ended up having to do a stupid work around where I placed the field value in a table in SQL Server 2005 then grabed the value from the table...the...

SSRS 2005