Press "Enter" to skip to content

The Biml Interrogator

Shannon Lowder has an imposing-sounding project which does some very cool things:

After building connections, you need to build the file formats.  01_FileFormats.biml calls the interrogator class I built and tries to guess the structure of the files.  The script takes that information and then builds the Biml structure representing the layout of any csv or txt files it finds in SourceFolder. You can run this like the connections, Ctrl-click 00_GetOutput and 01_FileFormats, then right-click on the highlighted area and choose Generate SSIS Packages. You can then see the FileFormat nodes in output.biml.

After you have a biml representation of FileFormats, you can then generate the connections for the FlatFiles.  FlatFile connections have a required attribute for FileFormat. To see the code for the connections, you have to select 00_GetOutput, 01_FileFormats, and 02_Connections-FlatFiles. Then output will contain both the FileFormats and Connections to the flat files!

Read on for more details.