case statement in group by clause

Greetings,

I can't remember if I asked the list this before (it's been a very hectic 
month), if so, please disregard. I'm trying to find the most elegant way of 
integrating SQL into an application I am writing which has a potential for 
N^3*M fairly similar queries (Luckily enough N is 3 and M is 6, but could 
easily and very soon become more). Rather than explicitly write each of 
these out, or concoct some sort of illegible mutant 
string-concatenation/bind parameter frankenstein, I would like to simply 
create one massive query riddled with case statements triggered by named 
bind parameters. What is holding me back from this is the inability to 
coerce certain column types in a case statement in a GROUP BY clause. Now, 
the obvious solution would be to flatten each test out to return a value of 
the same type, although I'm not too sure how to access the original sorting 
function/operator that is associated with a GROUP BY clause. I'm sure this 
isn't a new problem, but I've run into great difficulty finding anything on 
the subject. Please advise.

Regards,

Dorian

_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com