Chapter 7. Grouping Control Flow with Containers

In This Chapter

• The Container Concept

• Common Container Properties

• Designer Groupingsthe Noncontainers

• The Task and the Taskhost Container

• The Simple Sequence Container

• The Looping Containers

• The Package Container

"IF I DON'T KNOW IT, IT'S NOT KNOWLEDGE."

MIKE BLASZCZAK

Containers are an important object in Integration Services packages. Visually, they provide separation and organization of the control flow. Under the covers, they are central to the functioning of packages. This chapter details the important role containers play in making packages simpler, better structured, more manageable, and consistent.

Containers are objects in Integration Services that contain other containers, forming a hierarchy of parent and child containers. Containers give structure to packages and provide services such as property expressions, breakpoints, transaction, variable, logging, and execution scope. Looping containers provide iterative workflow execution, whereas the Sequence container makes it possible to organize packages into subparts. Each task has its very own specialized container called the Taskhost that is, for the most part, transparent to the user. There is also an EventHandler container that the runtime can execute in response to a task or other component raising an event. Finally, as you might expect, packages are containers. Containers are central to all Integration Services workflow and understanding how they function is central to understanding Integration Services workflow.

Caution

The properties discussed here are those visible in the Business Intelligence Development Studio and are not all the properties found on containers. Some properties are not used at design time or by package developers.