our development team has the following problem with XML package configuration files. step 1: developer 1 enables package configuration. the configuration type is XML.all changes are checked into source safe. step 2: developer 2 gets latest from source safe. opens the package. the message appears... Warning1Warning loading Etl.dtsx: The configuration file name "C:\Dev\SSIS Projects\Etl\Etl.dtsConfig" is not valid. Check the configuration file name. C:\Dev\SSIS Projects\Etl\Etl.dtsx11 step 3: developer 2says "ok whatever. i will just update the path",reconfigures the configuration path to point to the file on their local system wherever that may be. when they are done, the changes are checked into source safe. step 4: developer 1 will get latest from sourcesafe and open the project, and the evil cycle repeats. i've tried specifying a relative path, but that doesnt seem to work, i get the same error.

The simplest way to fix this: put your configuration files in a common path on all machines. The next easiest way: use indirect configurations, which lets you use an environment variable to specify the location of the config file. http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2005/11/02/SSIS_3A00_-Indirect-configurations-ROCK_2100_.aspx

we currently have 9 development environments in total. the development team can definately work out a solution with proposal #1 (using a common path), we just have to remember to do this with each new developer/environment. we enjoy the portability of all our visual studio windows, web, analysis services, whatever, solutions, so its the first time in a long time we encountered an issue such as this.iprefer keeping things simple; no added layers, no workarounds, no gotchas. i think we will just rollback and avoid xml configurations altogether. we've been enjoying the simplicity of the "set values" and "data sources" anyway.

I'd highly recommend avoiding data sources in SSIS, if it all possible. They seem good, but I've had a lot of deployment headaches with them, since they are design time only items. I use indirect configurations very successfully, and it makes the packages portable - from developer to developer, as well as from the development environment to QA to production.

I'm attempting to utilize indirect configurations and seem to be messing up. I'm using the tutorial on Deploying Packages to try to learn. I'm doing this for my own package not the ones in the tutorial but I think it should work in a generalized fashion. I had attempted deploying the package to a test server using file location instead of environment variable. I received an error when attempting to run the package indicating that the path\file was invalid. I verified it did exists and decided to search this forum some more. All post with the error message I got point me back to the tutorial and the use of environment variables. So, I started again from scratch. At Step 2: Veryifying the deployment bundle there is a sentence as follows. ... Verify that the value of the AllowConfigurationChanges attribute is true and the XML includes a Package element for each of the two packages, a MiscellaneousFile element for each of the four non-package files, and a ConfigurationFile element for each of the two XML configuration files. ... The AllowConfigurationsChanges attribute is set to true but I do not see a line for the XML configuration file in the manifest and don't see the actual configuration file at ...\bin\deployment\SQL_To_Oracle.dtsConfig as I think I should. Shouldn't the file be created? I have set the following options. In my package Property Pages I set AllowconigurationChanges to True and CreateDeploymentUtility to True. In the Package Configuration Wizard I have chosen XML configuration file as my Configuration type. I have checked the configuration location is stored in an environment variable and named my Environment variable: to SQL_To_Oracle_PkgCfg. I have created the SQL_To_Oracle_PkgCfg environement variable on the PC where I'm using BIDS and have it pointing to "C:\MySSISProject\bin\Deployment\SQL_To_Oracle.dtsConfig" When I build it builds with no errors and the new .dtsx file and manifest show up in bin\deployment but not the config file. Do you have any idea of what I might be missing? I figure it has to be something fairly obvious that I'm simply overlooking or misunderstood.

I seem to have worked around this but I'm really not sure if following the preferred method. What I did was create two configurations. One as I had previously described. The second was a file configuration like I had originally attempted. The second one generated the .dtsConfig file. I saved the .dtsConfig file and then removed the second configuration from the project. I created the environment variable on the test server I'm deploying to and copied over the Deployment folder that now contains the saved .dtsConfig file. I copied the .dtsConfig file to the location that the package dependancies would go to and added the password for the Oracle connection portion. At this point I ran the package installer by double clicking on the manifest and I don't get any errors during validation related to configuration any more.

There is now an utility available in CodePlex which can be used to batch update SSIS Package Configuration File paths without using BIDS: http://ssisconfigeditor.codeplex.com/