i was wondering if anyone had experienced this before or even better
knew of a fix. I am using an INI file to initialize several global
variables in my DTS Package through a Dynamic Properties Task. some of
the values are quoted strings which define columns for building a data
set. these strings can get fairly long in some cases, well over 255
characters.

the Global Variables i am populating are defined as Strings in the DTS
Designer, but the literal type is a BSTR. i know that this data type
can accomodate my strings (other global variables that are populated
dynamically contain thousands of characters).

my guess right now is that the problem is related to the OLE DB Text
File Provider for DTS. i have seen many posts related to truncation of
strings during exports, but i have been unable to find a single thread
about truncation using a DP Task and an INI file.

since i have no direct access to the connection used to open this INI
file and the DP Task does not have any properties which could address
this issue, is there some other fix i should be looking for?

i realize i can use an ActiveX Script Task to read these values in
through a separate step, but i would love to address the problem
through the object model.

any thoughts out there?

In message <96711523.0408201007.55332eca (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>, mike k
<punchmk (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> writes
There is a limit in the length of strings you can use though INI files,
probably related back to the original INI file API used under the covers
I expect.

I did some tests a long time ago, and found that there is a limit is 254
characters.

There an also be issues with exproting lomg character strings, but this
is really a designer bug, not a DTS bug, as you can overcome this quite
easily-

DataPump truncates delimited fields to 255 characters
(http://www.sqldts.com/default.aspx?297)

--
Darren Green (SQL Server MVP)
DTS - http://www.sqldts.com

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