Biml versus CodeSmith and MyGeneration
After a recent conference a participant pointed me to CodeSmith and MyGeneration as alternatives for BimlScript. And although I don’t have any experience with these tools from their website I understand he is right. You could use these tools in a similar fashion.
Both are generic code generators and given a document with a certain xml or other format they’ll be able to loop through a dataset and inject values to the original document. So you could use a certain ssis package… Investigate the xml… Add placeholders… Loop through a dataset … replace the placeholders in the ssis package with the information from your dataset … and save the newly created documents.
One important disadvantage of this approach is the scrutiny of the rather complex xml in an ssis package. Biml offers an easier/cleaner way to describe a package because it doesn’t need to hold design aspect of the BIDS interface of the package.
An example of Biml with BimlScript:
