SSIS package template location

Question

Can we change the default location for package templates? Or at least add more locations?

I would like to create some templates and add them to the source control but I'm not very keen on adding a file on the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\DataTransformationProject\DataTransformationItems folder to the source control.

How do you deal with that?

Answer 1

I've never tried moving it, but when we built out templates, we had a Common project that contained common material (we're creative like that) like configuration settings for databases as well as template packages. The solution also had a start up project with nothing in it but a post build script where we'd copy the templates into the above path. That way people didn't have to worry about this "complex copying stuff" to get started.

copy /y "$(SolutionDir)\SQL\SSIS\PackageTemplate.dtsx" "$(DevEnvDir)\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\DataTransformationProject\DataTransformationItems"

As rvphx reminded me, you will want to have people that use your templates to reset the Package ID. Otherwise, you greatly complicate reporting against your sysdtslog90/sysssislog table. The free visual studio add on, BIDSHelper, has a feature to reset the GUIDs from the project window. Another issue I ran into with our own templates was they would a physical file name that we provided but did not match the Package Name property inside SSIS. We'd either assign a junk physical file name and then rename it to the proper name or just remember to fix it in the package properties.

Answer 2

The template we've been using is pretty plain-vanilla (mostly a bunch of standard variables, connection managers and event handlers for SSIS 2008), and a couple of years back I wrote a NAnt script to build a simple one-package solution. Since the .dtsx format is just XML, it's not too terribly difficult to make a text template file out of a minimalist package and use NAnt's <replacetokens> task to replace things like package names and GUIDs. It's even easy to create unique GUIDs, since NAnt lets you embed C# code in your scripts:

<script language="C#" prefix="script" >
    <references>
        <include name="System.dll" />
        <include name="System.DirectoryServices.dll" />
    </references>
    <imports>
        <import namespace="System.DirectoryServices"/>
    </imports>
    <code>
        <![CDATA[
        [Function("create-guid")]
        public static string CreateGuid() 
        {
            return Guid.NewGuid().ToString().Trim();
        }
        ]]>
    </code>
</script>

<property name="PACKAGE_DTSID_GUID" value="${script::create-guid()}"/>
<property name="PACKAGE_VERSION_GUID" value="${script::create-guid()}"/>

Answer 3

To plainly answer your questions :

No you can't change it. No you can't add more locations.

As described, you can script copy from one location to this folder. This is what most of us do.