How can I position the element generated by XMLTEXT in a FOR XML query?

Question

I'm trying to use FOR XML to simulate an OData feed. One of the requirements I have is that somewhere I need an XML element which is constant for all records; I was planning to use the XMLTEXT directive for this.

My XML needs to look like this; for every record in the database,

<entry>
    <id>1</id>
    <test type="dummy" />
    <!-- some more nested elements -->
</entry>

When I use the following query, the <test> element appears before the <id> element, even though the declaration appears after it:

CREATE TABLE #temp (id int);
INSERT INTO #temp VALUES (1), (2);

SELECT
  1    AS Tag,
  NULL AS Parent,
  id   AS [entry!1!id!ELEMENT],
  '<test type="dummy" />'
       AS [entry!1!test!XMLTEXT]
  -- other columns
  FROM #temp
  FOR XML EXPLICIT;

DROP TABLE #temp;

This gives the following results (fiddle):

<entry>
    <test type="dummy"/>
    <id>1</id>
</entry>

Am I doing something wrong here, or is this a limitation of XMLTEXT? A workaround might be to treat it as a regular nested element, but would that work even though I have more nested elements further down in the <entry> element?

Answer 1

After some more fiddling, I found out that there is an XML directive which does the job (if I omit the attribute name, test):

SELECT
  1    AS Tag,
  NULL AS Parent,
  id   AS [entry!1!id!ELEMENT],
  '<test type="dummy" />'
       AS [entry!1!!XML]
  FROM #temp
  FOR XML EXPLICIT;

This produces the results I want:

<entry><id>1</id><test type="dummy" /></entry>

(demo)

This directive is mentioned briefly here but I couldn't find more documentation or any examples.

Answer 2

If you for some reason does not need for xml explicit you could use for xml path instead which I for one think is a bit easier to handle.

You could cast the string literal to XML

select T.id,
       cast('<test type="dummy" />' as xml)
from #temp as T
for xml path('entry');

Or you could set it up as a value

select T.id,
       'dummy' as [test/@type]
from #temp as T
for xml path('entry');