No, I understood the real issue. I am very familiar with the TDS protocol and its issues. However, Morton (not the original author) said that he couldn't figure how to get return values from stored procedures. That's all I was commenting on. Resorting to RAISERROR for everything introduces a lot of the same problems as resorting to exceptions for everything in object-oriented languages. Learning how and when to use stored procedure return values (and/or output parameters) instead of RAISERROR can help you to become a better SQL Server programmer.
The problem with your last statement is that you are treating the return value as only a fatal indicator. Think of it as a return value. I have lots of cases where I want to return one or more scalar values in addition to the result set. These are all return values (and/or output parameters) that are something other than fatal indicators. I use the return values (and/or output parameters) to assist in further processing the result set. -----Original Message----- From: Moderated discussion of advanced .NET topics. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of J. Merrill Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 3:41 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [ADVANCED-DOTNET] Stor proc return values and DataReader I believe you missed the real issue (really described only in the very first message in the thread [which hasn't been repeated], and replicated in the last message at the bottom). It's not that anyone is having trouble "figur[ing] out how to use" SP return values -- the problem is that you can't get the value of any OUTPUT parameters, or the SP return code, until after the network has transmitted (and the client machine has swallowed) all the data describing all result sets. Using RAISERROR apparently interrupts the "here are the result sets" part of the data stream sent to the client -- at least, that's what people are thinking. The example at the very bottom shows the annoyance of not being able to see the SP return code until the entire "select name from author" result set has been returned. I haven't encountered in my work any SP which generated a result set and then figured out it wanted to return a failure indication (and the app didn't want to see the result set due to whatever the failure was), but if that's what you need to do.... =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentor� http://www.develop.com Some .NET courses you may be interested in: NEW! Guerrilla ASP.NET, 17 May 2004, in Los Angeles http://www.develop.com/courses/gaspdotnetls View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
