Preserve element order while shredding XML data into SQL strings

Question

How to return a sequence of elements when chopping XML into strings in a SQL Server view?

Input Example:

<ol>
  <li>Smith</li>
  <li>Jones</li>
  <li>Brown</li>
</ol>

Required Conclusion:

Sequence  Name
--------  -----------
    1     Smith
    2     Jones
    3     Brown

Existing view:

CREATE VIEW OrderedList
AS
SELECT [Sequence] = CAST(NULL AS int)   -- TODO: Get ordinal position
       [Name] = b.b.value('.', 'nvarchar(max)')
FROM
(
    SELECT a = CAST('<ol><li>Smith</li><li>Jones</li><li>Brown</li></ol>' AS xml)
) a
CROSS APPLY a.a.nodes('/ol/li') b (b)

Answer 1

You can use row_number()in xml node.

CREATE VIEW OrderedList
AS
SELECT [Sequence] = ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY b.b),
       [Name] = b.b.value('.', 'nvarchar(max)')
FROM
(
    SELECT a = CAST('<ol><li>Smith</li><li>Jones</li><li>Brown</li></ol>' AS xml)
) a
CROSS APPLY a.a.nodes('/ol/li') b (b)

Ref: Unique XML host identifier with DENSE_RANK from Adam Machanich.