SQLHelp
Stored procedure documentation tool

New Version: 2.42

Supporting Windows Server 2003 as a development platform.

SQLHelp produces database documentation for the stored procedures in your database project. The documentation includes the input parameters, their types and directions, output result sets, executed procedures, return values, and transactional nature, independent of the path of execution. Extended capabilities include declarative procedure grouping, hyperlinked executed procedure access and query analyzer style syntax color coding. All documentation is generated via SQL batch files and requires no active database connection.

SQLHelp produced documentation is ideal as printed database documentation for clients, online access for middle tier developers to develop against a documented database interface and quality assurance efforts to ensure consistent coding guidelines are followed. SQLHelp documentation can also be produced at the beginning of projects to help define the interface contract between the database layer and its consumers.

In documenting the procedures as you design them, and by defining an interface contract, you can ensure the stability and reliability of your end application. Extending upon existing capabilities, version 2.41 of SQLHelp contains a number of enhancements that make the job of effectively documenting your SQL procedures even easier.

Object oriented design techniques have existed for some time, and they all have a guiding principle of defining the interfaces to objects, and adhering to those interfaces, often called contracts. Database procedures offer the capability to define SQL interfaces, but tools to actually document the interface are few and far between.

SQLHelp bridges this gap. As explained on the benefits page and the features page, you can use SQLHelp to document the input parameters, return values, and output result sets for a database procedure, without actually writing the SQL. The resultant documentation can be turned over to middle tier or presentation tier developers as appropriate to develop against.

By paralleling the development efforts, and ensuring interface contracts exist, the time to market for the application, and the quantity of hard to find bugs are both reduced. Increased code quality, consistency of code, and efficiency of development time all translate into lower development costs, and allow for earlier time to market, which makes you, and your clients money.

Ultimately, you need to determine if SQLHelp offers the level of service you desire, but given its low cost of ownership, even saving a few hours of development time makes the return on investment high.

Version 2.42 Changes

Version 2.42 contains only bug fixes. Specifically:

Applied to listings accessed from the table of contents were displaying a page not found error. Now fixed.

Version 2.41 Enhancements

Version 2.41 contains only bug fixes. Specifically:

If your SQL file was named Test.txt, and your source and destination folders were the same, SQLHelp would accidentally delete it when testing for write permissions on the output folder.
If you entered more than 255 characters for the description of
return values, an error would occur and the procedure would be omitted from the output
Custom file extensions were not being saved to the project file correctly,
resulting in all extensions becoming .sql
See Also functionality broke for version 2.40 and has now been restored.
Multiple word data types ( e.g. national character vs. nchar) are now supported.
Parenthesis surrounding the parameter list broke for version 2.40, and are now fixed.

Version 2.40 Enhancements

Version 2.40 contains several bug fixes, as well as new functionality.

Added the option to format the output using a modern MSDN layout.
Output formatting is controlled via stylesheet
Improved parameter processing for WITH and FOR operands
Improved handling of parameters with explicit collation settings
If extended properties are used for object descriptions, the "default"
and variable assignment forms of procedure call are supported
If the description was written with national (UNICODE) characters,
it would not be included. Now fixed.
Procedure call hyperlinks are verified against the list of objects to
link to, eliminating invalid links.
If dynamic SQL is executed, it will now be listed as "Dynamic SQL #n",
where n is the index of the execution. This is a change in behavior
from previous versions which would include the SQL being executed.

Version 2.31 Enhancements

This is a bug fix release. The following items changed:

On certain systems, an "Object or With Block" error could occur. This was due to a misplaced file stream close, which was being erroneously closed for each batch in the file (double free bug)

Version 2.30 Enhancements

Version 2.30 sees minor system enhancements including:

When working with very large SQL files, the batch validation would consume considerable system resources for a significant period of time. This problem has now been resolved. Please note that the larger the SQL source file, the more pronounced the problem was, and that you should still expect processing times for source files larger than 2MB to be noticeable.
Under a very specific scenario consisting of string tokens contained in multi-line comments, parsing errors would result leading to a failure to process all the SQL objects in the source file.
If a RETURN statement followed a SELECT statement, and that RETURN put the return value in parenthesis, if there was no space between the RETURN and the parenthesis, the return would be included in the result set for the SELECT as an unnamed column.
If a stored procedure returned data only via output parameters, it was erroneously included in the Uncategorized section
The sql_variant data type of SQL Server 2000 was not colorized