SQL Server and MS BI With a Geek Touch

In this blog, I will walk you through the creation of excel files ( xls / Excel 2003)  dynamically through SSIS.

Scenario: every day one of my process runs to pull data from SQL server table to excel file. I need to use unique file everyday with name as “taxonomy_<date>.xls” , for example on 14^th of January 2011 the file name should be “Taxonomy_01142011.xls” with the excel sheet name “TaxonomyValues”.

It is pretty simple to create this file dynamically. At first we need to set up an excel connection manager pointing to the file. The connection manager needs to be dynamically configured to point to the correct file everyday, in our case “Taxonomy_01142011.xls” on 14^th Jan. To do this,

1. go to properties window of the excel connection manager
2. click on expression and the browse ( … symbol) and choose “excel File Path” property. ( please refer the pictures below)
3. Copy and paste the expression given below or develop similar expression. Click on evaluate expression and it will display the file path as evaluated value.

“C:\\Taxonomy_”+ (MONTH( GETUTCDATE()  ) < 10? “0 “+(DT_WSTR,2) MONTH( GETUTCDATE()  ) DT_WSTR,2)MONTH( GETUTCDATE()  ))

+(DAY( GETUTCDATE()  ) < 10? “0 “+(DT_WSTR,2) DAY( GETUTCDATE()  ) DT_WSTR,2)DAY( GETUTCDATE()  ))

+(DT_WSTR,4)YEAR( GETUTCDATE()  ) +”.xls”

Also you need to use the settings as below for connection manager ( for .xls files)

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In 64 bit operating systems, SSIS transformations ( especially excel) and tasks throws errors that could be annoying. You will often come across errors as shown below.

SSIS package “Package.dtsx” starting.

Information: 0x4004300A at Data Flow Task, SSIS.Pipeline: Validation phase is beginning.

Error: 0xC00F9304 at Package, Connection manager “Excel Connection Manager“: SSIS Error Code DTS_E_OLEDB_EXCEL_NOT_SUPPORTED: The Excel Connection Manager is not supported in the 64-bit version of SSIS, as no OLE DB provider is available. Read more…

Today, I came across a requirement, where the source excel sheet had data starting from row number 6 and column B. This was due to formating in the excel, which was also used as a report by many stake holders.

Although at first it might seem like there are no options in excel source to skip certain rows from the beginning of the sheet, it is not true. Fortunately, excel source provides the feature to select only required records from any sheet.  the OpenRowset property on the Excel Datasource component  allows you to specify the range to be considered by the datasource.

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