Hello

I am confused about some of the code in the News module about how to create a new News category.

The database has a stored procedure called InsertCategory which inserts a new category into the database.

This procedure will raise an error if the category already exists and returns a value of 99.

What is the significance of the number 99? Also what is the point of returning a value of 99? The method calling the procedure does not access the return value.

I'm a bit hazy on raiserror. Will this raiserror statement cause the execution of the stored procedure to stop

RAISERROR ('Insert of Category failed', 16, 1)

Thanks very much
andrea

That's the SQL 2K method of raising an exception. It doesn't understand real exceptions, but it just aborts and returns the specified error code.

Hi

Thanks for your reply. I'm still a bit lost about the return value. Here is the extract from the SP

IF @@ERROR > 0
        BEGIN
        RAISERROR ('Insert of Category failed', 16, 1)
        RETURN 99
        END
    END

Will the number 99 be returned because it happens after the raiseerror?

Why return the number 99? Is there any significance?

Thanks a lot
andrea

The idea is that it only terminates processing if the error code is a fatal code. That bit of code you're talking about uses error code 16, which is not fatal. Therefore, the 99 will be returned to the caller, and the caller can also test to discover the error 16. I don't remember what Marco is doing in that code, but you should be able to understand it.

Unfortunately, SQL Server error handling has always been a weakness in my mind. Even though they added real exceptions in 2005, they still don't have as much functionality in exceptions as we'd like, and your current transaction may become unusable in the catch, depending on the nature of the exception. This does make sense, but you need to study up on it before using it so it doesn't bite you.

Use google if you want more info on it. There's a ton of hits if you search for Raiserror.

Eric