There’s a minor annoyance in SSIS with the way the diagram of the package is saved. If you’ve ever spent time working in a package with a lot of objects, you’ve probably encountered it. You move some objects around, save the package, close it, then reopen it. When the package is displayed, the objects are off center, or maybe don’t even show up. This is because the view is scrolled so that all the objects aren’t in the initial viewable area.
If you want a little background on what’s happening, read this paragraph. Otherwise, skip ahead to the next one. Each object in the diagram is saved with it’s x (Horizontal) and y (Vertical) coordinates persisted in the DTSX file. In addition, the view’s current Left and Top position is saved as well. These settings tell the IDE how to lay out the diagram, and how to initially position the view of it.
To reset the initial view, you need to alter the XML for the package directly. As with any direct editing of the XML, it’s not supported, and you should definitely make a backup of the package first. You need to alter the PersistedViewPortLeft and PersistedViewPortTop properties. Be aware, there may be multiple copies of these values, one set for the control flow, and one set for each data flow defined in the package. You can set these values to 0 in order to reset the view to a 0,0 top left corner.
The XML tags you are looking for look like:
<dwd:PersistedViewPortLeft>0</dwd:PersistedViewPortLeft>
They may also appear as escaped versions of the XML (not sure why, some of my packages do this, others display normally):
<dwd:PersistedViewPortLeft>0</dwd:PersistedViewPortLeft>
Just change the value between the tags to set the property value.