VS2012 Post-Deployment script referring to several other scripts

Question

I have created a database project in VS2012. I added database structure. It works fine to publish and compare database.

Now on publish I want to automatically load several tables with default data.

I created five script files with INSERT statements generated from SQL Management Studio. They were added to a Script folder in my database project.

Then I set BuildAction=PostDeploy. This works fine. BUT from some reason it is only possible to have ONE script set to PostDeploy ....

I realize I can move all scripts into one file. But I have a lot and would really like to group them in separate files to maintain some order.

I then created one PostDeploy.sql file and tried to reference all other script files from there. The file header gives directions:

Post-Deployment Script Template                         
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This file contains SQL statements that will be appended to the build script.
Use SQLCMD syntax to include a file in the post-deployment script.
Example:      :r .\myfile.sql

So I write my file:

:r .\MyScript1.sql
:r .\MyScript2.sql
:r .\MyScript3.sql
:r .\MyScript4.sql
:r .\MyScript5.sql

The file complains on wrong syntax.

Answer 1

It turned out that Visual Studio fooled me with wrong syntax warnings! My setup was perfectly valid.

To avoid warnings right click anywhere inside the file and choose "Execution Settings - SQLCMD Mode".

There is also a toolbar button named SQLCMD Mode doing the same thing.

Here is the menu item in case you can't find the toolbar button: