Markup in descriptions

[alex.weatherall]

Is it (or could it be) possible to allow HTML markup in the description. I wish to add emphasis tags to important notes in my documentation.

e.g. "This is <b>important</b>" would appear as : "This is important" in the documentation.

This feature would be very useful.

Thanks,

Alex

[David Lovemore]

Alex,

This is not the first time this has been requested.

Would you want this on the MS_Description property, though?

My inclination is to use HTML_Description, or BBCode_Description, or RTF_Description and then put a plain text description on MS_Description. So in your database you would have two properties automatically set by SQL Doc:

HTML_Description property is "This is <b>important</b>"
MS_Description property is "This is important"

This is not unlike how formatted emails work.

This would avoid breaking compatibility with other tools which read this and already existing descriptions that say e.g. "This constraint checks 0<b and 10>b".

Would that make sense for you? Or would that annoy you?
_________________
David Lovemore
Red Gate Software

[alex.weatherall]

Hi David,

I don't mind if different extended properties are stored in the database so long as it's seamless in the GUI. i.e. I wouldn't want to manually maintain both copies - I'd expect to edit my description in HTML mode and it maintain a plain text version in MS_Description and the HTML version in HTML_Description.

This brings me to another question that may have been asked before. Are you planning on supporting editing bespoke extended properties?

Thanks,

Alex