Group everything with the same first two letters

I'm working on a stored procedure that works fine. I just want to make it possible for the user to be able to have a drop down list in reporting services to display the "question codes" grouped by whatever the first two digits are. for example.

VT01

VT02

VT03

VN01

VN02

VN03

ST01

ST02

ST03

instead of listing everything, i want the viewers to see this

VT

VN

ST

or an alias for each of these like this:

Vet Tasks

Vet National

Survey Tasks

Survey National

any ideas, here's my current code, which is pullin up anything with the added substring part

Code Snippet

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[Testing_Questions]

(@.Region_Key int=null,@.QuestionCode char(5))

AS

BEGIN

SELECT dbo.Qry_Questions.Territory,

dbo.Qry_Questions.SalesResponsible,

dbo.Qry_Questions.Customer,

dbo.Qry_Questions.Date,

dbo.Qry_Questions.StoreName,

dbo.Qry_Questions.PostCode,

dbo.Qry_Questions.Address2,

dbo.Qry_Questions.[Question Code],

dbo.Qry_Questions.Question,

dbo.Qry_Questions.[Response Type],

dbo.Qry_Questions.response,

dbo.Qry_Questions.sales_person_code,

dbo.Qry_Sales_Group.Region_Key,

dbo.Qry_Sales_Group.Region

FROM dbo.Qry_Questions

INNER JOIN dbo.Qry_Sales_Group

ON dbo.Qry_Questions.sales_person_code COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS = dbo.Qry_Sales_Group.SalesPerson_Purchaser_Code

WHERE REGION_KEY=@.Region_Key

AND SUBSTRING(dbo.Qry_Questions.[Question Code],0,3)=@.QuestionCode

END

SET NOCOUNT OFF

You should do the following:

1. Create a separate question code types table with a type column (this will be "VT", "VN", "ST" and so on) and description column

2. Create another table that maps the question code to the types table

3. Now, for display purposes you can show the data from types table

4. Similarly, for your query instead of using the information encoded in the value (using substring etc) just join with the code to types mapping table and filter on the type column

This approach will scale better, perform better and easier to manage. Currently, you are breaking normalization rules by inferring attributes from a value.