How can I know when SQL Full Text Index Population is finished?

Question

We are writing unit tests for our ASP.NET application that run against a test SQL Server database. That is, the ClassInitialize method creates a new database with test data, and the ClassCleanup deletes the database. We do this by running .bat scripts from code.

The classes under test are given a connection string that connects to the unit test database rather than a production database.

Our problem is, that the database contains a full text index, which needs to be fully populated with the test data in order for our tests to run as expected.

As far as I can tell, the fulltext index is always populated in the background. I would like to be able to either:

1. Create the full text index, fully populated, with a synchronous (transact-SQL?) statement, or
2. Find out when the fulltext population is finished, is there a callback option, or can I ask repeatedly?

My current solution is to force a delay at the end the class initialize method - 5 seconds seems to work - because I can't find anything in the documentation.

Answer 1

I would like to offer an easier-to-read version of @Daniel Renshaw's answer:

DECLARE @CatalogName VARCHAR(MAX)
SET     @CatalogName = 'FTS_Demo_Catalog'

SELECT
    DATEADD(ss, FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY(@CatalogName,'PopulateCompletionAge'), '1/1/1990') AS LastPopulated
    ,(SELECT CASE FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY(@CatalogName,'PopulateStatus')
        WHEN 0 THEN 'Idle'
        WHEN 1 THEN 'Full Population In Progress'
        WHEN 2 THEN 'Paused'
        WHEN 3 THEN 'Throttled'
        WHEN 4 THEN 'Recovering'
        WHEN 5 THEN 'Shutdown'
        WHEN 6 THEN 'Incremental Population In Progress'
        WHEN 7 THEN 'Building Index'
        WHEN 8 THEN 'Disk Full.  Paused'
        WHEN 9 THEN 'Change Tracking' END) AS PopulateStatus

Results:

LastPopulated           PopulateStatus
----------------------- ----------------------------------
2012-05-08 14:51:37.000 Idle

(1 row(s) affected)