Variable value concatenation in SSIS is usually done with a Script Task. I am going to demonstrate variable concatenation with a For Loop Container in this post while working on a real world scenario of sending all files from a folder as email attachments.
Drag a ForEach Loop Container in the Control Flow. Then drag a For Loop Container within the ForEach Loop Container. There are no other tasks in these two containers. Finally add a Send Mail Task to the Control Flow and join it to the ForEach Loop Container with a precedence constraint.
The final package looks like this.
ForEach Loop Container is used to iterate through all files in a folder and return their full paths. For Loop Container will concatenate the file paths in a variable. Send Mail Task will use the concatenated file paths as an attachment list in an email.
Declare two variables of string type at the package level. Variable @[User::FELC_Iterate] will hold the single file path returned by the ForEach Loop. Variable @[User::FLC_Concat] will hold the concatenated list of file paths passed from the other variable.
Double click the ForEach Loop Container to open the properties editor. In the Collections tab, give the folder path and select the radio button for fully qualified file name. You can also set the filter for the file types (e.g. *.txt, *.xls etc.). I let it be at its default of all files (i.e. *.*).
In the Variable Mappings tab, set the variable @[User::FELC_Iterate] to index zero so that it can hold the file paths returned by the ForEach Loop Container. Click OK to close the editor.
Now double click the For Loop Container to open its properties editor. Set the InitExpression to –
@[User::FLC_Concat] = @[User::FLC_Concat] + @[User::FELC_Iterate] + "|"
This expression will append the @[User::FELC_Iterate] value coming from the outer ForEach Loop along with a pipe symbol to the @[User::FLC_Concat] in each iteration. The pipe symbol is the separator required by the Send Mail Task if there are multiple files as attachments.
One iteration of the For Loop will suffice our requirement to append the variable value. So set EvalExpression to 1<0, or any improbable boolean condition. The For Loop executes once and then evaluates this condition to see if it can go for another execution. The improbable condition will exit the loop on second iteration because the condition will evaluate to FALSE. Click OK to close the editor.
Double click the Send Mail Task to open its editor. Setup the SMTP connection and other fields in the Mail tab. In the Expressions tab, add an expression for FileAttachments to use the @[User::FLC_Concat] variable. Click OK to close the editor.
Execute the package and the file paths are concatenated as shown on the Locals window. These files would be emailed as attachments.
