text TEXT teXt?

The Problem

A reader ran into a problem on an old post about Automating T-SQL Testing. Thankfully, rather than decide that I’m some useless crank on the internet, this reader took the time to write in to me and tell me about the problem. But, he went one step further: he documented step by step his problem!

The Process

I fired up SSMS and verified his problem (using the thoughtfully provided steps to duplicate). Sure enough, my code didn’t work. Which is odd because I’ve used this very same code to test stored procedures. At this point, I calmly stood up, walked away from my computer, opened the window, and swore loudly. I then closed the window, walked back to the computer, and sat down. After numerous permutations, I finally searched google in exasperation only to find out it was a capitalization issue (read all about it over here). Where was this coming from?

The Actual Problem

The GeSHi JavaScript syntax highlighting library was capitalizing the word ‘text’ because it is a datatype in SQL Server. Unfortunately, the text() XML method is lowercase. So, in this isolated incident, my syntax highlighting was causing me problems. The solution was to remove syntax highlighting from that portion of my post and inform the reader of the problem.

What to do?

Well, you need to test things. In this case, though, it was something that I couldn’t effectively test. The developers of the GeSHi plug-in should probably be testing these things (and I’ll be tracking down their info to send them a bug report). The key here is, I guess, to be very very careful. Really I just wanted to share this bug so others don’t get caught by it.