Is there a variable which can store other variables of the same type?

Question

I am learning SSIS 2008. I want to store many file paths in separate variables and put them into some "variable that holds multiple variables of the same type". Can I do this in SSIS 2008 ? If yes, then how ?

Answer 1

SSIS Variables come in two flavors: simple types (integers, strings, dates, floating point numbers) and an Object. You can put anything into an Object. The simple types must obey the rules for their domain.

You could use an Expression or a Script Task to concatenate your file paths into another Variable of type string but you'd need to be cognizant of the 4000 character limit on expressions.

I'm assuming you're going to do something with all of those values once you can get it into an enumerable thing. SSIS has a native tool for it, the ForEach Enumerator. It can shred native .NET collections like List, DataSet, Array as well as XML.

I mention all of that as you might be able to save yourself the hassle of collecting all of your paths into different variables when you might need to only populate the collection and then pull from there.