I’ve been away a bit in the last week with personal and family commitments. As a result, I feel a bit out of touch with work, and I have some catching up to do. However, when I ran across the SQL Prompt Treasure Island, I had to take a few minutes and go through it.

Code Snippet Cove

I love snippets. I first loved the idea in Visual Studio and Query Analyzer a long time ago, but SQL Prompt has taken this to a new level. I’ve used snippets quite often to make life easier and speed up development.

This part of the island talks about all the tokens that are available. There are all sorts, but some of my favorite are using $CURSOR$ to ensure the cursor gets dropped where I want it. This lets me immediately start typing.

I love $DATE$ and $USER$ for pre-populating comment sections of code, and there are plenty more metadata/environment type tokens that you can use, including the $PASTE$ for the clipboard.

While the tokens are great, I think that just the Snippets themselves, with custom placeholders, such as $userrole$, which I use for adding security to object creates, are incredibly handy. I’ve even used partial snippets for joins. For one job, we constantly needed to put together  these tables: Product, ProductCategory, OrderHeader, OrderLine, and Address. We had a snippet that just contained these tables with the appropriate ON clauses for joins.

Explore snippets, and you might never want to work without SQL Prompt again.

In the next post, I’ll take at look at the rest of the map.