Three examples of the use of snippets

So why would you create your own snippets in SQL?  This pages gives three ideas.

Example 1: imposing a convention for stored procedure comments

If you want to ensure that everyone in your company follows the same rules for creating a stored procedure, you could create a comments snippet:

Right-click and choose the option shown.

You can now choose which snippet you want to add:

Here I've put all my snippets in a separate folder.

You could then choose your snippet to add stored procedure comments:

Choose this snippet to add comments before your stored procedure.

Lo and behold:

Now all you have to do is to fill in your name and the date you last updated this procedure.

Example 2: automatically adding standard joins

How many times have you joined the same tables together?  To avoid reinventing the same wheel time and time again, put your joins in a snippet:

Here you can add joins just by inserting a snippet.

You can now delete any joins that you don't need for this query:

The trick is to include every join in your snippet, then comment out or delete the ones you don't need for your current query.

Example 3: putting selected code in a comment block

I think this is my favourite example.  Having written a block of code, you will often want to make it stand out, for example by turning this:

Into this:

Having inserted the SurroundText snippet, you could then edit the comment to say anything you wanted.  To do this, you need to include a different type of snippet:

Choose one of the surround snippets that you've written (here we've only created one):

You can see that we've set a description for the snippet too, which appears as the tool tip (here it begins with the word Puts, but I've truncated the rest of the screen shot).

Time now to tidy up:

I'd indented my comments within the surround snippet, which in retrospect was probably a mistake.

Having looked then at what you can do with custom snippets, the next part of this blog shows how to create them.