Create SSIS Import parsing based on text file...

Question

I have a text file listing 500 field names and their lengths.  (In a few months we will begin receiving monthly data files matching that schema). I can create an SSIS 2008 project and manually parse the columns (inside SSIS)  to match that
schema but I wonder if there is an easier way to do what I want (e.g. if I created a table using t-sql commands could SSIS somehow "pickup" the SSIS parsing from the table schema?)
TIA,
edm2

Answer 1

Not exactly. What I was hoping for is that instead of pointing SSIS to the data file and manually parsing all the fields that  I could create an (empty) table with the right schema and have SSIS use that table schema to define how it should
parse the input data. (Kind of backwards from the usual approach.)
edm2
Sorry you cant parse text file for metadata like that as metadata has to fixed in SSIS
However one way you can implement this is as follows
1. Create your table with required schema
2. In SSIS have a data flow task with flat file source which points to your file. Choose only a row delimiter and no column delimiter
3. Put a oledb destination and point to staging table with an identity column
4. Put a Execute SQL Task  with query as below
SELECT CASE WHEN (SELECT Column FROM Staging WHERE IDCol=1) = STUFF((SELECT ',' + COLUMN_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'Your schema table name'
AND TABLE_SCHEMA = 'dbo'
FOR XML PATH('')),1,1,'')
THEN 0
ELSE 1
END AS SchemaDiff
FROM (SELECT 1)t
Then map SchemaDiff column in the resultset to a boolean variable created in ssis. Also make sure you set resultset option to single row
Then you can use this boolean variable to check if schema is same. If False means no difference in schema else there's difference.
just a caution thar this will only compare column details without comparing their datatypes,lengths etc
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