Programmatically get parameters required by DACPAC

Question

Is there a way to find out what parameters a DACPAC requires? I know they are listed in an error message if you try to publish without parameters, but that takes too long - 10-15 seconds. Also, a database needs to be targeted to get the error message with the list.

Answer 1

The DACPAC is just a zip file, so you could UnZip it and parse the model.xml file contained.

small extract from one of my dacpacs:

<DataSchemaModel FileFormatVersion="1.2" SchemaVersion="2.4" DspName="Microsoft.Data.Tools.Schema.Sql.Sql100DatabaseSchemaProvider" CollationLcid="1033" CollationCaseSensitive="False" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/dac/Serialization/2012/02">
    <Header>        
        <CustomData Category="SqlCmdVariables" Type="SqlCmdVariable">
            <Metadata Name="ABC" Value="" />
            <Metadata Name="XYZ" Value="" />
        </CustomData>

so I need to define the SqlCmdVariables ABC and XYZ for this dacpac