I forgot to mention this.  It's safer to create a variable a save the value of @@rowcount.

That's because @@rowcount is evaluated after any t-sql statement... as demonstrated here :

Declare...

Yes it does.  But just creating a fake primary key on a view will not fix the problem.  You need to create a primary key on the table(s) displayed in the...

create procedure...

insert into ...

Select...

IF @@RowCount = 0

BEGIN

RAISERROR ('No rows were inserted (SpName)', 13, 1)

RETURN 1 --custom error message for that proc

END

I would suggest you go back to the developpers to see if they can find a better solution.. if they can't and you have a working one, then use it......

Again WHY????

Explain from A to Z what you need to do.  There are way too many possibilities for me to start answering that question.

And the view is only used on the server???

Can you give more details on what you are trying to accomplish, it would greatly help us provide the best solution.

Why can't you use the application to display the row count?

Thanx for the appreciation.  I had also considered you version, but I didn't like the fact that I couldn't reverse engineer the constraint to understand the business rule.  And since...

Thanx for clearing that up.  As for the outrage part, I can't say I didn't feel the need to but I try to let the user explain the reasons before...

I'm tempted to say that you should reconsider the whole operation.  I never saw the need for continuous calls of the same function to do selects.

Can you post some sample...

Alright, thanx for clearing this up.

Good luck finishing that project!

Can you post some sample data and the required output... without that we can't help you anymore than we already did.

The view in question is located in the master database.

However the information displayed comes from the database from where you call the view.

So if you call the view from pubs,...

I'm afraid to ask but here it goes :

Why isn't this data kept in a single date time column?

In a single ROW????

Then I suggest you tell him to prove you wrong.  Otherwise you can send him the link to this thread and start doing some more productive work!