c# - Checking referential integrity rule violation before deletion

Question

Before deleting a row from a table, is there any simple way to check that it would violate a referential integrity rule? I'd like to do this from a C# win form application (.Net 3.5) using SQL Server 2005.

Answer 1

You might do the delete inside a transaction:

try
{
  begin transaction
  delete row
}
catch SQLException
{
  if SQL error indicates referential integrity violation
    throw ReferentialIntegrityViolationException
}
finally
{
  rollback transaction
}

(assuming you never want the delete to take place at this point in your code)