Question

I am running a stored procedure in SQL Server 2008 inside a try/catch. The stored procedure and the stored procs it calls raise a few errors but in the try/catch you only get the last error from the stored procedure that you are running.

Is there a way/trick to be able to somehow catch ALL the errors generated by child stored proc calls while running a particular stored procedure? (assume that you have no access to any stored procedures so you can’t modify where they can write the error, i.e. you can’t just change all the stored procedures to stop raising errors and instead write them to some table and in your catch read from that table)

Answer 1

Here is a good resource for how to deal with error handling in SQL Server.
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Development/anerrorhandlingtemplatefor2005/2295/

However, some of the methods require that you have the ability to change the code in order to capture the errors. There is really no way of getting around this. You can’t just ignore the error, keep processing, and then come around later to deal with the error. In most, if not all, languages, exceptions have to be dealt with at the time the exception was raised. T-SQL is no different.

I personally use a stored procedure to log any error whenever it occurs. Here is what I use:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[Error_Handler]
@returnMessage bit = 'False'
WITH EXEC AS CALLER
AS
BEGIN

  INSERT INTO Errors (Number,Severity,State,[Procedure],Line,[Message])
  VALUES (
    ERROR_NUMBER(),
    ERROR_SEVERITY(),
    ERROR_STATE(),
    isnull(ERROR_PROCEDURE(),'Ad-Hoc Query'),
    isnull(ERROR_LINE(),0),
    ERROR_MESSAGE())

  IF(@returnMessage = 'True')
  BEGIN
    select Number,Severity,State,[Procedure],Line,[Message]
    from Errors
    where ErrorID = scope_identity()
  END
END