Question

Is there a way in SSMS editor to visually separate two comment blocks that are placed one right after another when the comments are collapsed?

Please look at the link below – remember that this code is just for demonstration purpose.

When this code is collapsed in the SSMS editor, I see all the commented code collapsed.

I want to be able to see each comment block as a separate collapsed region, as in below (this is an edited image) –

I did consider using a GO, but in my case this code is part of a stored procedure, and I have a BEGIN and END that encapsulates this part of code, so that will not work.

I thought of using BEGIN/END, but that will not work either because I only have comments and no code that goes inside.

The closest work-around I came up with is using a blank PRINT ” – but, I fee this is redundant, and even counter-productive when used inside a stored procedure that will always be called from the application and would never be run from SSMS except when debugging.

Does anyone have any ideas on this? Suggestions/direction of any free third-party plug-ins is also appreciated.

Answer 1

I don’t know of any way to do it without the comments collapsing into one region.

In SQL Server 2008 Management Studio (and probably most recent ones), you can use {$REGION} to at least give you a way to name or describe the collapsed region, which may help:

{$REGION "Comment One"}
-- This is comment one
{$ENDREGION}

SELECT dbo.

{$REGION "This is comment two"}
-- This is a separate comment
{$ENDREGION}

SELECT ...

But there has to be content between the two regions, or they still get merged into one.

The above also works while embedded inside /*..*/ comments, too (which is valid T-SQL, for @scriptfromscratch), but it still merges the comments unless there is content between them:

/* {$REGION  "Test region 1"}
-- This is a test comment
{$ENDREGION}
*/

SELECT dbo.something

/* {$REGION "Test region 2"}
This is test comment 2
{$ENDREGION}
*/

SELECT dbo.

It looks to me like you’ll need a third-party tool of some sort that provides this functionality, but I’m not aware of one that does this, I’m afraid.