Debugging Parent / Child Packages

Hi there,

I have a Business Intelligence project containing 4 packages. One of the packages is a parent package that just runs the other 3 packages sequentially (passing in variables via Package Configurations).

When I set the properties of the Execute Package tasks in the parent package, it seems that I can only select SQL Server or File System locations for the child packages.

What I want to do is for the parent to run the packages in the Visual Studio Project so that I can debug the whole process. I don't want to be bothered deploying the child packages so that I can run them from the parent, at least not while I am debugging the whole process.

How do I get the children to run within Visual Studio as well as the parent? I can't for the life of me find anything on the MSDN about this.

Many thanks in advance.

Richard F

I am not sure what your problem is. If I execute the parent package in BIDS; all children packages are open and execute in debug mode as well. At least that is the behavior I get when storing the packages in .dtsx files; I don't know if the behavior is diffrent when storing them in the DB.

|||Hi there,

Thanks for your reply.

Can I ask what you do when you create the parent package?

I did the following:
- Added an "Execute Package" task to the parent
- Edited properties of the task
- Set the location to File System
- Added a new connection manager of type File Connection and pointed this to the location of the child package in the development folder (i.e. the folder used by the VS.NET package project)
- Set the connection of the parent package equal to this connection manager

Then when running the parent package in VS.NET, it did not step into the child package as you described, and to be honest I'm not really surprised since at no point when specifying the child package from the parent did I tell it to run in VS.NET.

How did you reference the child package from the parent?

Many thanks in advance.

Richard F|||It's real simple. In the parent package, use an Execute Package task to call your child package. Double click on the Execute Package task, and select the package you want to run.

Then, when you are in the parent package, you can run the debug (start button, or F5, I think) which will start the child package accordingly.