Access to SQL Server messages via ADO.NET

Question

Is it possible to access the SQL Server "by-product messages" via ADO.NET? Due to the lack of words, by "by-product messages" I mean the output which appears in the Messages tab in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. What I particularly have it mind is to read the output of SET STATISTICS TIME ON. It appears that SqlDataReader does not offer anything in this matter.

Answer 1

Yes, there's an event on the SqlConnection class called SqlInfoMessage, which you can hook into:

SqlConnection _con = 
   new SqlConnection("server=.;database=Northwind;integrated Security=SSPI;");

_con.InfoMessage += new SqlInfoMessageEventHandler(InfoMessageHandler);

The event handler will look like this:

static void InfoMessageHandler(object sender, SqlInfoMessageEventArgs e)
{
    string myMsg = e.Message;            
}

The e.Message is the message printed out to the message window in SQL Server Management Studio.

Answer 2

Thank you for the response above. I just did a little experiment and found a little unexpected glitch (a bug?) when reading messages (in this case produced by SET STATISTICS TIME ON) from a multi-recordset result. As indicated below, one has to call NextResult even after the last resultset in order to get the last message. This is not needed in the case of a single recordset result.

using System;
using System.Data.SqlClient;

namespace TimingTest
{
    class Program
    {

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection("some_conn_str");
            conn.Open();

            conn.InfoMessage += new SqlInfoMessageEventHandler(Message);

            SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("some_sp", conn);
            cmd.CommandType = System.Data.CommandType.StoredProcedure;

            SqlDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();

            while (rdr.Read()) { };

            rdr.NextResult();

            while (rdr.Read()) { };

            // this is needed to print the second message
            rdr.NextResult();

            rdr.Close();

            conn.Close();

        }

        static void Message(object sender, SqlInfoMessageEventArgs e)
        {
            Console.Out.WriteLine(e.Message);
        }

    }
}

Answer 3

Based on marc_s' answer, I ve created a wrapper class

public class SqlInfoMessageWrapper
{
     public SqlInfoMessageWrapper(SqlConnection connection)
     {
            SqlConnection = connection;
            connection.InfoMessage += new SqlInfoMessageEventHandler(InfoMessageHandler);
      }
      public SqlConnection SqlConnection { get; set; }
      public string Message  { get; set; }

      void InfoMessageHandler(object sender, SqlInfoMessageEventArgs e)
      {
            Message = e.Message;
      }
 }

Example of use :

    using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
    {
        connection.Open();
        var messageWrapper=new SqlInfoMessageWrapper(connection) ;

        var ret = SqlHelper2.ExecuteNonQuery(connection, CommandType.Text, command, null);
        messages+= $"{messageWrapper.Message} number of rows affected {ret} ";
    }