I used to think it was fantasy that the memory starts going as you get older. Then I though it was a curse, as it got tougher to answer questions of the type which once would have been easy. Then life became hell when everyone seemed to become a developer of a new language. All they had to do was create a bunch of tags to reference some data and as long as they used the tags consistently then they had created labels that could be used to refer to that data. The use of these labels could facilitate communication between two parties in a controlled fashion (language).  

This is obviously one of the features which gives XML its power, the ability to define your own reality! However, if there is no control over this flexibility then you descend into hell as soon as you press the ‘<‘ and you have a bad memory.

So we have schemas (descriptions of corresponding XML documents, themselves written in XML) which help people to communicate what can be represented by the tags. One can even use comments to make the tags understandable to the human reader of the schema. However the schema is primarily used by a machine to ensure that the corresponding document is valid in terms of structure, if not necessarily content.

This is great if you get given an XML document and you have to read it. You can refer to the schema when you don’t understand a tag to see what other things it could contain to gain an idea of the context of the value within the tag. However, XML is more commonly used every day, and when it is used as a control for a configuration file then a feature which would be more useful is a list of the values that can be inserted at a given context within an XML document.

Well this has been possible in Visual Studio (VS) previously and if you have used it there then you miss it if it is not possible to do in an XML editor window within SQL Server Management Studio (SQLMS).

So thanks Bill for the question which prompted the search for the answer to your question which led to me sharing this with others that may not be aware either of the fact that this aid is available in VS or that it can be extended to SQLMS.

"Is it possible to give the XML document editor in SQLMS intellisense like it is available in VS."?

Of course the answer is yes and the process is:-

1) Identify the directory that contains the schemas that SSQMS is aware of . You will find this inside Tools/Options/Text/Miscellaneous. The expanded name for the default setup is ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Xml’

2) Within this directory identify the catalog.xml file.

3) Identify the directory that contains the Schemas of interest. In this example we will use the schema directory created by Microsoft for Notification services of which the default location is   ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\NotificationServices\9.0.242\XML’  and identify the XML Schemas that you are interested in 

4) Take the schema description information from the file of interest

      and insert it into the catalog.xml file (See step 2).  

5) Open a corresponding XML file and edit it. Notice the drop down list box when you type ‘<‘.

6) This is what is being referred to as Intellisense! The contents of the drop down list box changes based on the location where you are inserting a new tag/ label.

 7) Now that is useful wouldn’t you agree 😉 Go Play!