Wednesday, January 27, 2010

SSIS Bug – The DataFlow task has no components

Have you ever experienced this nasty bug in SSIS.  You create a package in SSIS and after adding all your data flow tasks and making sure you got everything ok, now when you finally run your package, nothing happens.  Then looking at the progress window, you see this warning message: “[DTS.Pipeline] Warning: The DataFlow task has no components. Add components or remove the task.”  What happened?  Then you try to run it again, then nothing happens still.  Now when you close your project and re-open it.  Some of your control flow items no longer can be read or some are missing.  Huh!  Now blood pressure starts to rise.

What’s going on?  Apparently, something’s gone wrong with the XML serializer.  Remember all packages are saved in XML format.  So somehow when it’s done that, some of the components were not recorded properly.  When I tried to trace which components gone bad, I was able to determine that it was my Flat-file connection.  I got this error message when I tried to edit it:

ssis03

As it turned out, the flat file itself has some weird characters in the first line.  Because I’m using the first line to get my column names, this causes the serializer error.  So my solution is to skip the first line and just use the generic Column 0, Column 1 headings.  The downside is I have got ambiguous columns but at least not that nasty error.

Again, just a note to myself. 

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