In the last few months, I’ve been giving a preview on some of the new advanced SSIS tasks and transforms being released in the coming version of Task Factory. Well Task Factory 3.0 has finally been released last month, and its packed with a ton of really cool tasks and transforms that are going to make SSIS development easier and will increase the performance of your packages.

One of the newest SSIS tasks released in Task Factory 3.0 is the Advanced Execute Package task. The really cool part about this task is the MUCH improved interface. It’s now incredibly simple to set up variable mappings from a parent package to a child package.

Here you can see the editor for the Advanced Execute Package Task. There are three areas of the editor I want to take a look at.

The first area, highlighted in green, is where you specify your connection to the child package. If the package is in the file system, you simply browse to the location of the package. If the package is located on a SQL Server, you need to select the SSIS connection manager to use. In either case, if the package has a password, you’ll need to enter that.

The second area of the Advanced Execute Package Task, highlighted in yellow, is where you create mappings between variables in the parent package and variables in the child package. In the Assignment Direction drop down list, you have a few different options.

We can read a variable from the child package, write a variable to the child package, or do both simultaneously. In my case, I’m passing a variable to the child package so I will select “Write variable to child package”. Then I just need to select the Child Package Variable and the Parent Package Variable.

Once I’ve done that, I can just click “Add Mapping”. Now we can see the mapping created between the two package variables in the last area (highlighted in pink in figure 1). Using this method, we can create multiple variable mappings between the parent package and the child package.

As you can see the Advanced Execute Package Tasks from Task Factory is very intuitive and simple. If you’ve used the native SSIS Execute Package Task, you’ll recognize that the new Advanced Execute Package Tasks is much simpler and easier to configure.