When using FOR XML EXPLICIT
in SQL Server, we can use the ELEMENT
directive to include a column as an element instead of an attribute. However, this directive doesn’t allow for NULL values. What I mean is that if a column contains a NULL value, no element is produced for that column in the resulting XML document. This may or may not be what we want, depending on the requirements.
If we want such columns to be included in the XML even when they contain NULL values, we can use the ELEMENTXSINIL
directive instead of ELEMENT
.