SSIS - creating a custom connection manager

Question

Anyone aware of guidance on creating a custom SSIS connection manager? I want to abstract the complexities of a source system for the folks that need to extract data out of it using SSIS.

Answer 1

Is it a one-off package, or intended to be reusable? If the latter, you could simply use a script as a source component (per this example). If it needs limited re-use, copy/paste may be good enough; if not then perhaps a custom component (example here) would do the trick.

Answer 2

The MSDN tutorial is probably not a bad place to start. I haven't tried using their examples to implement a custom connection manager, but I was able to follow their documentation on custom data flow components to create a few of those without too much fuss in the past, so hopefully the connection manager examples are on the same level. I also found this example, which is probably a little more extensive code-wise since it was actually developed for use.

Keep in mind (as they mention on the MSDN page) that custom connection managers don't always play nice with the built-in components, so you often have to create custom data source components as well. Information about developing those seems to be more common at least, probably because actually parsing the source data tends to be a more varied task than setting up the connection.