Logging Output In A Transaction

We have a publish job that we are trying to automate, the problem is getting the output back to the app. or a file. Originally we had print statements, this worked great when we manually ran the proc in QA and could capture the output, now that we are automating it from an application I am not sure how to capture these Print statements - ideally I would like to find this out.

The App. is doing a Try-Catch block so using something like isql.exe will not do the trick otherwise that is the route we would go.

I tried logging everyting to a table but those inserts get rolled back with XACT_ABORT. What about the xp proc that logs it to the event log? Thought of that but that would make a real mess of the event log with all of our status messages.

Now we are considering using xp_cmdshell that calls a batch file to output our status text, is this my best option? I would prefer to capture all of the print statements so if anyone knows how to do this that would be preferable!

Thanks!