How to concatenate strings of a string field in a PostgreSQL 'group by' query?

Question

I am looking for a way to concatenate the strings of a field within a group by query. So for example, I have a table:

ID   COMPANY_ID   EMPLOYEE
1    1               


        

Answer 1

I found this PostgreSQL documentation helpful: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/functions-conditional.html.

In my case, I sought plain SQL to concatenate a field with brackets around it, if the field is not empty.

select itemid, 
  CASE 
    itemdescription WHEN '' THEN itemname 
    ELSE itemname || ' (' || itemdescription || ')' 
  END 
from items;