As I imagine that the majority of people who are reading this will have some level of SSIS knowledge, I’ll not go into explanations about package configurations in SSIS and its various methods but rather jump straight to it.

The majority of environments I’ve worked in where SSIS packages are utilised, tend to sway down the XML Config package configuration method. As many of you are aware, in multi-tier SQL Environments (ie. Integration, QA, UAT etc etc) this can be a pain when deploying the packages to the relevant environments because you have to at some stage reconfigure the XML configuration file to have the correct parameters to pass into the package for each environment. This can become an even worse scenario when you have tens if not hundreds of SSIS packages (and corresponding dtsConfig’s) and are upgrading your infrastructure with new servers (and/or instance names) as well as drive configurations.

If you don’t have the time to be re-working the SSIS packages to use a SQL table (depending on your process this could take a while to get through development, testing etc) to hold the configuration parameters which makes it easy to script, deploy and update then here’s a simple trick using Powershell (i’m still at the very basic Powershell level so bare with me!!) you can use for your existing dtsConfig files. The sample i’ll be using is for a dtsConfig used in a Restore package.

Unfortunately you’re still going to have to do some initial amending of one config file here .

Firstly, lets amend the relevant parameter values to have a standard name for each, as an (snipit) example:

<Configuration ConfiguredType=”Property” Path=”\Package.Connections[master - destination].Properties[ServerName]” ValueType=”String”>

<ConfiguredValue>*SQLInstance*

</Configuration>

<Configuration ConfiguredType=”Property” Path=”\Package.Variables[User::DataFilesDir].Properties[Value]” ValueType=”String”>

<ConfiguredValue>*DataFilesDir*

</Configuration>

I’ve used a * to prefix and suffix the parameter so that you don’t amend anything that may have a similar name.

By doing this, you can run a bit of Powershell to update the relevant element parameter values for each instance by using the code below, NOTE i’ve excluded the setting of the parameters etc as I use this as a module and don’t want to waste space:

#Create Copy for dtsConfigs by piping the date from the static file (with *'d parameters to the new file to be used
(Get-Content $RestoreDatabasesDynamicConfig) |
Set-Content $RestoreDatabasesDynamicConfig_New
#Amend the dtsConfig's and create new files to use
$restoreArray = ("SQLInstance", "DataFilesDir", "LogFilesDir", "SSISRestoreLocationDBs")
#Loop through the array to replace each parameter listed
foreach($Arr in $restoreArray){
$Replace = "\*"+$Arr+"\*" #This sets the parameter with the * prefix and suffix
$WithThis = "$"+$Arr #What parameter name passed in to replace the text with, ie. $SQLInstance, $DataFilesDir
switch ($Arr)
{
# Use $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.ExpandString($WithThis) to evaluate the string (ie $SQLInstance)
"DataFilesDir" {$WithThis = $SQLInstallLocation+$ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.ExpandString($WithThis)}
"LogFilesDir" {$WithThis = $SQLInstallLocation+$ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.ExpandString($WithThis)}
#I've left the above in as an example of how to set the files to a folder location passed in as a Parameter ($SQLInstallLocation)
default {$WithThis = $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.ExpandString($WithThis)}
}
#Now create the new dtsConfig file with updated Parameter information
   (Get-Content $RestoreDatabasesDynamicConfig_New) |
Foreach-Object {$_ -replace "$Replace", $WithThis} |
Set-Content $RestoreDatabasesDynamicConfig_New
}

In short, this script is taking the amended dynamic file with all the parameters with their *’s prefixed and creating a new dtsConfig file. It then builds an array of parameters to work through and do the replacement, the values of these are(or indeed can be…) passed through to the function/module. I’ve put a switch in there to check for particular items in the array as in my example i wanted to append a folder location to the value passed in. you don’t necessarily have to do this but left it in to show it can be done.

Another example of using this is for a silent SQL Server 2008 install. Once you have a ConfigurationFile.ini then you can follow the same process to put a standard tag in the file and use powershell to find and replace it with a parameter value – works an absolute treat when installing many instances

I’m sure there’ll be someone far more clever than me that can somehow the file for the element and replace any value without standardising the parameter values but I’m no expert with Powershell and learning everyday and hope some others out there can get some use out of this…..and yes, I also realise that you can do a “Find and Replace in Files” with Notepad++ but this technique is great for automating!