Hello,

What is the best way of documenting SSIS packages?

I am not interested in purchasing any software, but I would appreciate it if anyone had a general template that covers the key information of any SSIS package that should be defined and documented.

Thanks,

It's a problem.

One of these days I might create a little hack to prettyprint an SSIS package, but probably just the basic features that I use, connections, dataflows, SQL tasks, configurations - that's about it.  The other two zillion features, I dunno.

Make it open source and let everyone add to it, I guess.

Josh

Lots of different ways of documentation out there.  It all depends on what is necessary in your organization.  Jamie T did a great blog post on reading the XML to gather some info: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2009/10/18/collecting-information-about-your-ssis-packages-ssis-nugget.aspx

At a minimum I try to generate the dependencies for read / write / execute... in other words, if you need it to run the package, document it.  There is a description property on nearly everything in SSIS.  I suggest using them all.  Also, annotations are great to give the first impression when opening up any design surface, although to be honest I have kind of gotten away from them in lieu of using the description properties mentioned above.

Hope this helps!

But adding annotations doesn't give you actual "documentation". You can't print out annotations, or make those annotations an actual artifact. Annotations are viewable only in the designer interface.

But adding annotations doesn't give you actual "documentation". You can't print out annotations, or make those annotations an actual artifact. Annotations are viewable only in the designer interface.