Programmatically retrieve SQL Server stored procedure source that is identical to the source returned by the SQL Server Management Studio gui?

EXEC sp_helptext 'your procedure name';

This avoids the problem with INFORMATION_SCHEMA approach wherein the stored procedure gets cut off if it is too long.

Update: David writes that this isn't identical to his sproc...perhaps because it returns the lines as 'records' to preserve formatting? If you want to see the results in a more 'natural' format, you can use Ctrl-T first (output as text) and it should print it out exactly as you've entered it. If you are doing this in code, it is trivial to do a foreach to put together your results in exactly the same way.

Update 2: This will provide the source with a "CREATE PROCEDURE" rather than an "ALTER PROCEDURE" but I know of no way to make it use "ALTER" instead. Kind of a trivial thing, though, isn't it?

Update 3: See the comments for some more insight on how to maintain your SQL DDL (database structure) in a source control system. That is really the key to this question.

You will have to hand code it, SQL Profiler reveals the following.

SMSE executes quite a long string of queries when it generates the statement.

The following query (or something along its lines) is used to extract the text:

SELECT
NULL AS [Text],
ISNULL(smsp.definition, ssmsp.definition) AS [Definition]
FROM
sys.all_objects AS sp
LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.sql_modules AS smsp ON smsp.object_id = sp.object_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.system_sql_modules AS ssmsp ON ssmsp.object_id = sp.object_id
WHERE
(sp.type = N'P' OR sp.type = N'RF' OR sp.type='PC')and(sp.name=N'#test___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________00003EE1' and SCHEMA_NAME(sp.schema_id)=N'dbo')

It returns the pure CREATE which is then substituted with ALTER in code somewhere.

The SET ANSI NULL stuff and the GO statements and dates are all prepended to this.

Go with sp_helptext, its simpler ...

You said programmatically, right? I hope C# is ok. I know you said that you tried SMO and it didn't quite do what you wanted, so this probably won't be perfect for your request, but it will programmatically read out legit SQL statements that you could run to recreate the stored procedure. If it doesn't have the GO statements that you want, you can probably assume that each of the strings in the StringCollection could have a GO after it. You may not get that comment with the date and time in it, but in my similar sounding project (big-ass deployment tool that has to back up everything individually), this has done rather nicely. If you have a prior base that you wanted to work from, and you still have the original database to run this on, I'd consider tossing the initial effort and restandardizing on this output.

using System.Data.SqlClient;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Common;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo;
…
string connectionString = … /* some connection string */;
ServerConnection sc = new ServerConnection(connectionString);
Server s = new Server(connection);
Database db = new Database(s, … /* database name */);
StoredProcedure sp = new StoredProcedure(db, … /* stored procedure name */);
StringCollection statements = sp.Script;