Question

I am trying to setup a simple snippet in SQL Server management studio. When I heard the word “snippet”, I assume that they would work like they do in Visual Studio. By that I mean that there are variables that get filled in, etc… I am not seeing that.

Can someone tell me whether SSMS 2012 supports Visual Studio style snippets. If so, can you provide an example of a snippet that supports variable replacement.

Answer 1

This might be close to what your looking for. Under View->Template explorer is a list of a whole bunch of structures that you regularly use when working with, building, developing databases. You can also get to it using Ctrl+Alt+T. There are literally hundreds in there. Everything from building a view to setting up a trigger to creating XML schemas.

The really nice thing with templates is you can build your own structures that you regularly use. I have built quite of few of my own templates to hold snippets that I have acquired from the likes of Brent Ozars blitz scripts and others like the improved SP_WHO from Adam Machanic and such.

While maybe not as fancy (read interactive) as the ones you’ll find in the Visual Studio projects I find them very handy.

If you use these templates there is another little feature that can be very handy. If you press Ctrl-Shift-M (or use the toolbar button that shows an A->B) you get a dialog that lets you easily replace the template parameters with your own values.

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Update post research into SSMS2012

I just recently started using SSMS 2012 and see there is a new feature that I wasn’t aware of. When right clicking you do in fact see the ‘Insert Snippet’ drop down. I understand your question better now. Apparently however, these are pretty much the same as what I posted above.