Selecting first N characters when querying the CMS

Question

I am trying to retrieve only the first 6 characters of the SI_KEYWORDS field when querying the CMS from within the SDK.  When testing within QueryBuilder the following in bold does not work, although LEFT is a command for achieving this in SQL.  Can someone help me to know if this is possible within QueryBuilder SQL and if so how to achieve it?
Select LEFT(SI_KEYWORD,6) as keyword, SI_NAME From CI_INFOOBJECTS, CI_SYSTEMOBJECTS, CI_APPOBJECTS WHere SI_KIND='webi'
and SI_KEYWORD != '' and SI_KEYWORD != 'Hidden' and SI_KEYWORD != 'Auditor'
ORDER BY keyword, SI_NAME
Thanks,
Dave

Answer 1

Hi Ted,
Thanks for your reply.  I understand the querying of the CMS better after reading it. 
We are utilizing the keywords field and the description field to obtain some metadata about our reports that I need to access from java code.  Unfortunately, we have 4 different pieces of metadata we want to store and only the 2 fields in which to store them, so we are using delimiters in the keywords field to separate the values.  For example, we have "value1value2" as the keyword field in one report, but in another report if value2 is blank we simply have "value1".  This works well as we just parse the delimiters in java and we can store the 2 different values in the one keyword field.  The part that is not working well with this approach, though, is ordering the results.  We want to order the reports by value1 and then by SI_NAME.  Because some of the reports have value1value2 and others just have value1 it throws this ordering off if I use "ORDER BY SI_KEYWORD, SI_NAME". 
I've been looking for ways to get around this without doing a re-sort in Java and this is all I could think of:
1. Are there some additional user-defined fields that we could expose in the report properties in the CMC, and then retrieve via Query Builder / SDK?  Something like SI_UDF1, SI_UDF2, etc.  All we could find were keywords and description.
2. Using a SUBSTR or LEFT-like function on the keywords field so that it only gets value1 for sorting purposes only, but still retrieve the entire keywords field in the SELECT.  I understand now based on your explanation that this will not work as (if I understand correctly) it would modify the report object in the CMS to set the keyword to the truncated value.
Any advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated.  I know I can always bite the bullet and do the sorting java-side once I get the resultset back, but I was hoping to avoid the performance hit of doing that.
Thanks,
Dave