Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Integration Services

14.4. Debugging Components

Debugging components is a really great feature of SSIS. If you are a Visual Studio .NET developer, you should easily recognize the interface. If you're not familiar with Visual Studio, hopefully this section will allow you to become proficient in debugging your components.

There are two phases for debugging. The design-time can be debugged only while you're developing your package, so it makes sense that you will need to use BIDS to do this. The second experience, which is the runtime experience, is slightly different. You can still use BIDS, though, and when your package runs, the component will stop at breakpoints you designate. You need to set up a few things first, though. You can also use DTExec to fire the package straight from Visual Studio. The latter method saves you the cost of invoking another instance of Visual Studio.

The component you are going to debug is the Reverse String transform.

14.4.1. Design-Time

You will now jump straight in and start to debug the component at design-time. Open the component's design project and set a breakpoint at ProvideComponentProperties (breakpoints are discussed in Chapter 13). Now create a new SSIS project in BIDS. In the package, add a Data Flow task and double-click on it. If your component is not in the Toolbox already, add it now.

To add a component to the Toolbox, right-click on the Toolbox and select Choose Items from the context menu. When the Choose Toolbox Items dialog box appears, click the SSIS ...