Getting error Invalid length parameter passed

Question

Hi,
I'm getting an error running my query. It say "Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING  function. I will be getting the string in between of hyphen using the code below. May i ask your assistance or idea on how to fix this issue.
thank you.
 Substring(ins.itemid,11,CHARINDEX('-',ins.itemid+'-',11)-11) AS MODEL
Msg 537, Level 16,
State 3, Line 1
Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING
function.
Sample data of Itemid.
B300-4410-ONEMAX-U
B300-1725-XWHT-U
B300-3110-VT981-U
B300-1720-DRZRKCROBLK-U
B300-1720-DRDTHN32BLK-U

Answer 1

That'll cause empty strings to show up into you're result set but shouldn't cause the the SUBSTRING function to fail. 
The error is the result of the SUBSTRING function trying to bring back a negative number of characters.
Try running the following and see what comes back...
SELECT ins.itemid
FROM dbo.TableName ins
WHERE LEN(ins.itemid) < 11
If you don't find any itemids what are less than 11 characters (I'm 99% sure you will), try using a little test script like the following to test suspect values...
IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#temp') IS NOT NULL
DROP TABLE #temp
GO
CREATE TABLE #temp (
itemid VARCHAR(30)
INSERT #temp (itemid) VALUES
('B300-4410-ONEMAX-U'),
('B300-1725- '),
('B300- 3110-VT981-U'),
('B300-1720-DRZRKCROBLK-U'),
('B300- 1720-DRDTHN32BLK-U')
SELECT ins.itemid
FROM #temp ins
WHERE LEN(ins.itemid) < 11
SELECT
SUBSTRING(
ins.itemid, 11, CHARINDEX('-',ins.itemid+'-',11)-11) AS MODEL FROM #temp ins
HTH,
Jason
Jason Long