SOQL Alias a column

Question

I am wondering how you would do something simple like this in SOQL.

select first_name as name from tableA

I can not find any documentation on Aliasing a column which is very common in all forms of SQL, does anyone know if this is possible?

Answer 1

SOQL has very limited aliasing support. You can alias the table, e.g. SELECT a.name FROM Account a, but that's of very little use. In most contexts you cannot alias fields.

The one exception is for queries that use aggregations, like SELECT COUNT(Id) recordCount FROM Account allows you to alias the result of the aggregation from it's default expr0 to recordCount.

This probobly doesn't do what you're looking for, and you'll have to use some sort of transform in apex, middleware, or on the API client (depending on what and how you're building) to alias columns in non-aggregate use cases.

Answer 2

You can use object aliasing in any SOQL query

From the SOQL reference guide.....

Alias Notation

You can use alias notation in SELECT queries: SELECT count() FROM Contact c, c.Account a WHERE a.name = 'MyriadPubs'

To establish the alias, first identify the object, in this example a contact, and then specify the alias, in this case “c.” For the rest of the SELECT statement, you can use the alias in place of the object or field name.

The following are SOQL keywords that can’t be used as alias names: AND, ASC, DESC, EXCLUDES, FIRST, FROM, GROUP, HAVING, IN, INCLUDES, LAST, LIKE, LIMIT, NOT, NULL, NULLS, OR, SELECT, WHERE, WITH

See page 2 of the reference guide here

You can only use field aliasing with aggregate expressions. For more info on aliasing with aggregates, take a look here

http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/dbcom_soql_sosl/Content/sforce_api_calls_soql_select_groupby_alias.htm

Answer 3

As Chris mentioned, you can only alias aggregated fields. The syntax to use is like this:

SELECT Status, COUNT(id) Total
FROM Case
GROUP BY Status

Notice, no "AS" keyword like in vanilla SQL

Answer 4

Aliasing like this:

select first_name as name from tableA

isn't possible in Salesforce SOQL.

Answer 5

Alias notation also works with the toLabel() function in both SOQL and SOSL queries.

The toLabel function supports aliasing. In addition, aliasing is required when the query includes the same field multiple times. For example:

FIND {Joe} RETURNING Lead(company, toLabel(Recordtype.Name) AliasName)

— SOSL Reference: toLabel(fields)

The above excerpt, shows the use of the alias notation with toLabel function in a SOSL query, however, the same syntax works for SOQL queries.

For example, if we have the following Account records in Salesforce:

+--------------+--------------------+
| Name         | BillingCountryCode | 
+--------------+--------------------+
| A            | US                 |
| B            | IE                 |
| C            | CA                 |
+--------------+--------------------+

Without the toLabel alias we would only be able to select one of BillingCountryCode or toLabel(BillingCountryCode). If we tried to select both without an alias we would run into an error:

duplicate field selected: BillingCountryCode

Now, if we use alias notiation, we can query for both the Billing Country Code as well as the label as follows:

SELECT
    Name,
    BillingCountryCode,
    toLabel(BillingCountryCode) BillingCountryLabel
FROM Account

Then the above query would produce a query result as follows:

+--------------+--------------------+---------------------+
| Name         | BillingCountryCode | BillingCountryLabel | 
+--------------+--------------------+---------------------+
| A            | US                 | United States       |
| B            | IE                 | Ireland             |
| C            | CA                 | Canada              |
+--------------+--------------------+---------------------+

Answer 6

Directly write the alias name for example: select AccountID account ,count(id) countid from Account

you can also retrieve using get() function by passing the alias name in ' ' quotes example: object_reference.get(;

Answer 7

I think the answer is yes you can. Kind of.

The OP is asking whether you can do this like you can in SQL:

select first_name as name from tableA

So whilst SOQL doesn't support the above, you can achieve the same effect like this:

AggregateResult[] people = [select Firstname Name from tableA group by Id, Firstname];

I can see many others have mentioned aggregate queries but nobody has made it clear that you can take advantage of the aliasing possible with the group by query - the trick is to group by something unique like the Id. All the other fields you want to select out must be in the group by clause as well.

Access the result like so:

for(AggregateResult person:people) { 
  String theirName = person.get('Name');
}

Not sure why this isn't used more widely - it's what I do when I need to alias like you do in regular SQL.