How can foreign key constraints be temporarily disabled using T-SQL?

Question

Are disabling and enabling foreign key constraints supported in SQL Server? Or is my only option to drop and then re-create

Answer 1

One script to rule them all: this combines truncate and delete commands with sp_MSforeachtable so that you can avoid dropping and recreating constraints - just specify the tables that need to be deleted rather than truncated and for my purposes I have included an extra schema filter for good measure (tested in 2008r2)

declare @schema nvarchar(max) = 'and Schema_Id=Schema_id(''Value'')'
declare @deletiontables nvarchar(max) = '(''TableA'',''TableB'')'
declare @truncateclause nvarchar(max) = @schema + ' and o.Name not in ' +  + @deletiontables;
declare @deleteclause nvarchar(max) = @schema + ' and o.Name in ' + @deletiontables;        

exec sp_MSforeachtable 'alter table ? nocheck constraint all', @whereand=@schema
exec sp_MSforeachtable 'truncate table ?', @whereand=@truncateclause
exec sp_MSforeachtable 'delete from ?', @whereand=@deleteclause
exec sp_MSforeachtable 'alter table ? with check check constraint all', @whereand=@schema