Question

I have a SQL script that acquires table names and creates trigger for those tables. When I open the trigger after creating it all of the code is on one line. How would I go about adding tab and new line characters within the script to make the trigger more readable.

Example code:

SET @SQL = 'ALTER TRIGGER [dbo].[TRG_' + SUBSTRING(@TABLE_NAME,5, LEN(@TABLE_NAME)) + '_$AUD] '
        SET @SQL = @SQL + 'ON [dbo].[' + @TABLE_NAME + '] '
        SET @SQL = @SQL + 'FOR UPDATE, DELETE '
        SET @SQL = @SQL + 'AS '
        SET @SQL = @SQL + 'DECLARE '
        SET @SQL = @SQL + '@BIT INT, '
        SET @SQL = @SQL + '@FIELD INT, '
        SET @SQL = @SQL + '@CHAR INT '

Answer 1

For MS SQL at least, you can either use CHAR() with the correct ASCII values and concatenate at the correct places in your strings, or you can just include the newlines, tabs, etc. within your SQL strings themselves. The string can span multiple lines. For example, this should work:

SET @SQL = 'ALTER TRIGGER [dbo].[TRG_' + SUBSTRING(@TABLE_NAME,5, LEN(@TABLE_NAME)) + '_$AUD]
ON [dbo].[' + @TABLE_NAME + ']
...

'