If you develop in Visual Studio using C# or VB, then you are probably familiar with code snippets. They are little chunks of code that you can insert into your application and save you some typing. For example, if you are writing a C# application, and you type “if” and hit TAB twice, the following will be inserted into your code:
You can enter in the value to be evaluated, and then type in the rest of your code. I like code snippets because they save me from typing the same things over and over again. However, in SSIS 2005 scripting, code snippets weren’t available, due to the VSA environment used by the script objects. Now that we have a real scripting environment in SSIS 2008, code snippets can be used, although there are a few things you need to know.
Two of the most common activities I do in SSIS scripts are reading from and writing to variables. So, I put together a few code snippets that do this. Here’s what the snippet for reading a value from a variable looks like:
To create a snippet, you define the code snippet in an XML format, and save it to a file with a .snippet extension. I’m not going to post the code for the snippet here, as it is fairly verbose, but you can look at the .snippet file in any text editor. Once you have the file, you need to put it in a specific location for the Visual Studio environment to recognize it. This is where it can get a little confusing. Normally, snippets go into the “C:Users<user>DocumentsVisual Studio 2008Code Snippets<language>My Code Snippets” folder. However, this is the location used for the full Visual Studio environment. Since the script editors in SSIS use the Visual Studio Tools for Applications environments, they get their own folder. In fact, there are separate folders for the Script Task and the Script Component. Code snippets for the Script Task go into the “C:Users<user>DocumentsIntegration Services Script TaskCode Snippets<language>My Code Snippets” folder, and snippets for the Script Component go into the “C:Users<user>DocumentsIntegration Services Script ComponentCode Snippets<language>My Code Snippets” folder.
This actually works out well, because the code for the snippets is slightly different between the Script Task and Script Component. This is due to the object references being slightly different between the two.
I’ve provided two code snippets for C# for reading from and writing to variables in the Script Task, and the same two in C#, but altered to work in the Script Component. To use them, you can simply copy them to the above folders, and then type “SSISReadOneVariable” or “SSISWriteOneVariable” as a shortcut, followed by two tabs to insert them. You can change the shortcut in the snippet file if you’d like to use something else. It also wouldn’t be difficult to convert them to VB, if that’s your preference. The snippets are located on my SkyDrive. If you have ideas for other useful snippets, post a comment. Enjoy!