Poor Man's Scripting Tip

I love that you can script Publications for SQL Server Replication. I find that this provides a really good way to 'back up' all of your settings in case you need to re-initialize, make any big changes, or run into any problems – because serialized configuration details are tons easier to manage in the form of a script than trying to re-create a replication topology by virtue of remembering all of the options and configuration details that you specified (sometimes up to a few months) earlier on.

I also find that the UI and wizards used to set up publications also don't provide enough control or detail. But, I don't like generating entire publications from hand either. So generating basic publication details with SQL Server Management Studio and then outputting those details to script is an ideal way to get me 90% of where I need to be. And then I can just modify the generated scripts as needed.

One thing I don't like though, is that these generated scripts suffer from one-line-itis – in the sense that SSMS generates scripts with entire calls to Replication sprocs on a single line. Which can be a total pain to sort through when you're dealing with sprocs that have 10, 20, or more parameters.

Accordingly, a trick I use when playing around with SSMS generated scripts (not just replication scripts either) is to use poor-man's reformatting. And to do that, I just do a Find and Replace, specify that I want to use Regular Expressions, and then tell it to push the start of every parameter on to its own line – by replacing the literal text of @ with an @-sign preceeded by a carriage return and a tab – resulting in instantly formatted text. Or, as you can see from the screenshot below, I just replace \@ with \n\t\@.

Find and Replace:

After: