Hitachi Consulting BI Blog

Conditional branching in DTS

DTS 2005 adds a For Loop and a For Each Loop task. Very nice not to have to do spagetti hacks on precedence constraints. But I didn't see any kind of If task or Select Case task, and wasn't very happy about using Success as one branch and Failure as another branch of control flow. It took a little while (and some help from my art-school son) to track down how to do it, but it's pretty cool.

Now, in addition to a simple Success/Failure/Completion options, you can use AND or OR logic to add an expression . An easy expression is to test the value of a variable. So you can have one flow that is "Success AND @BranchVariable = 1" and another that is "Success AND @BranchVariable = 2" and so forth. You can still have a Failure track too. It's not really a conditional branch, because the expressions are independent, but that ultimately adds to the flexibility.

--Reed