Question

I’m reverse engineering a gigantic stored procedure. There are tons of BEGIN ENDs in it, not all indented properly, many levels deep, and I am having a heck of a time finding which BEGIN END pairs match each other.

Is there an easy way to find out which pairs match each other. I know in Visual studio you can jump from opening bracket to closing bracket with ctr+] and same thing in SSMS 2008. But I’m using 2005.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

In SQL Server 2005, ctrl+] still works for }, it just doesn’t work for BEGIN END. SQL Server 2005 doesn’t distinguish between commented out brackets and uncommented brackets, so my solution was to replace all BEGINs with BEGIN/*{*/ and all ENDs with END/*}*/.

So I had something like this:

BEGIN/*{*/

    BEGIN/*{*/

    END/*}*/

END/*}*/

With that I was able to jump back and forth to the paired BEGIN and END.

Look out for BEGIN TRANSACTION commands though, you don’t want them included in the replace.