How to THROW exception in inner transaction without ending SQL Server stored procedure execution?

Question

My objective is to throw an exception back to the caller but continue execution of the SQL Server stored procedure. So, in essence, what I'm trying to accomplish is a try..catch..finally block , even though SQL Server has no concept of a try..catch..finally block, to my knowledge.

I have a sample stored procedure to illustrate. It's just an example I came up with off the top of my head, so please don't pay too much attention to the table schema. Hopefully, you understand the gist of what I'm trying to carry out here. Anyway, the stored proc contains an explicit transaction that throws an exception within the catch block . There's further execution past the try..catch block but it's never executed, if THROW is executed. From what I understand, at least in SQL Server, THROW cannot distinguish between inner and outer transactions or nested transactions.

In this stored procedure, I have two tables: Tbl1 and Tbl2 . Tbl1 has a primary key on Tbl1.ID . Tbl2 has a foreign key on EmpFK that maps to Tbl1.ID . EmpID has a unique constraint. No duplicate records can be inserted into Tbl1 . Both Tbl1 and Tbl2 have primary key on ID and employ identity increment for auto-insertion. The stored proc has three input parameters, one of which is employeeID .

Within the inner transaction, a record is inserted in Tbl1 -- a new employee ID is added. If it fails, the idea is the transaction should gracefully error out but the stored proc should still continue running until completion. Whether table insert succeeds or fails, EmpID will be employed later to fill in EmpFk .

After the try..catch block, I perform a lookup of Tbl1.ID , via the employeeID parameter that's passed into the stored proc. Then, I insert a record into TBl2; Tbl1.ID is the value for Tbl2.EmpFK .

(And you might be asking "why use such a schema? Why not combine into one table with such a small dataset?" Again, this is just an example. It doesn't have to be employees. You can pick anything. It's just a widget. Imagine Tbl1 may contain a very, very large data set. What's set in stone is there are two tables which have a primary key / foreign key relationship.)

Here's the sample data set:

Tbl1
ID EmpID
1  AAA123
2  AAB123
3  AAC123

Tbl2
ID Role        Location EmpFK
1  Junior      NW       1
2  Senior      NW       2
3  Manager     NE       2
4  Sr Manager  SE       3
5  Director    SW       3

Here's the sample stored procedure:

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_TestProc]

    @employeeID VARCHAR(10)
    ,@role VARCHAR(50)
    ,@location VARCHAR(50)

AS
BEGIN

    SET NOCOUNT ON;

    DECLARE @employeeFK INT;

    BEGIN TRY
        BEGIN TRANSACTION MYTRAN;

            INSERT [Tbl1] (
                [EmpID]
            )
            VALUES (
                @employeeID
            );

        COMMIT TRANSACTION MYTRAN;
    END TRY

    BEGIN CATCH

        IF @@TRANCOUNT > 0
        BEGIN

            ROLLBACK TRANSACTION MYTRAN;

        END;

        THROW; -- Raises exception, exiting stored procedure

    END CATCH;

    SELECT
        @employeeFK = [ID]
    FROM
        [Tbl1]
    WHERE
        [EmpID] = @employeeID;

    INSERT [Tbl2] (
        [Role]
        ,[Location]
        ,[EmpFK]
    )
    VALUES (
        @role
        ,@location
        ,@employeeFK
    );

END;

So, again, I still want to return the error to the caller to, ie log the error, but I don't wish for it to stop stored procedure execution cold in its tracks. It should continue on very similarly to a try..catch..finally block. Can this be accomplished with THROW or I must use alternative means?

Maybe I'm mistaken but isn't THROW an upgraded version of RAISERROR and, going forward, we should employ the former for handling exceptions?

I've used RAISERROR in the past for these situations and it's suited me well. But THROW is a more simpler, elegant solution, imo, and may be better practice going forward. I'm not quite sure.

Thank you for your help in advance.

Answer 1

What's set in stone is there are two tables which have a primary key / foreign key relationship.

Using THROW in an inner transaction is not the way to do what you want. Judging from your code, you want to insert a new employee, unless that employee already exists, and then, regardless of whether the employee already existed or not, you want to use that employee's PK/id in a second insert into a child table.

One way to do this is to split the logic. This is psuedocode for what I mean:

IF NOT EXISTS(Select employee with @employeeId)
  INSERT the new employee

SELECT @employeeFK like you are doing.

INSERT into Table2 like you are doing.

If you still need to raise an error when an @employeeId that already exists is passed, you can put an ELSE after the IF, and populate a string variable, and at the end of the proc, if the variable was populated, then throw/raise an error.