I’ve been writing a User Defined Table (UDT) function based upon user defined conditions. One of the valid conditions utilises GetDate() to discover today’s date. However, if you simply use GETDATE() in a function you’ll get;
Invalid use of ‘getdate’ within a function.
This is because you cannot use non-deterministic functions within a UDT. The "correct" solution is to pass the GETDATE() value as an argument to the function, however, this requires that I change all the calling code and I don’t want to do that, besides why should I!
So my workaround is to create a fully fledged SQL table whose role in life is simply to return GETDATE()…
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[DummyDate](
[Today] AS (getdate()),
[Dummy] [nchar](1)
)
[Today] AS (getdate()),
[Dummy] [nchar](1)
)
Then within the function you can access the value by…
declare @TodaysDate datetime
select @TodaysDate = Today from DummyDate
select @TodaysDate = Today from DummyDate
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