Question

I need to robocopy files from one location to another in a SSIS package. Since the folder is on another domain, I need to impersonate another account before I run the robocopy.exe command. I found I can execute a “net use” command to impersonate the necessary user account and then execute the robocopy command immediately afterwards. I don’t see any way to do this in an Execute Process command to do this directly, so I use an Execute Process task to run a batch file that has these two commands as separate lines. The downside of this approach is that I cannot read the results of the Execute Process command. So this leads me to three questions:

1. Is there a way to execute a multi-line command in a single Execute Process task?
2. Is there a way to execute robocopy.exe while impersonating another account in one line?
3. Is there a way to write the results of a batch file back to either a variable in SSIS or to the SSIS database log?

If there is a positive answer for any of the above three questions, then I may be able to work out a way to add job success or failure rules based on the results of the robocopy command.

Answer 1

This can easily be achived if you have enabled the use of the Extended Stored Procedure “xp_cmdshell” (see Books Online for “Surface Area Configuration”).

In the following sample I have build a .CMD file containing all my ROBOCOPY options and simple executes this command file using xp_cmdshell grabbing the output to a table variable (can be a persistent table instead):

Just add a Execute T-SQL statement Task to your SSIS package with the following statement:

/** START **/

DECLARE @cmdfile nvarchar(255) = N'C:\myFolder\myCommandFile.cmd'
DECLARE @logtable table (
    [RowId] integer IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL
    ,[Message] nvarchar(1024) NULL
)

INSERT INTO @logtable ([Message])
EXEC xp_cmdshell @cmdfile

SELECT *
FROM @logtable
WHERE
[Message] IS NOT NULL

/** END **/

Depending on your logging options set for the ROBOCOPY command you can show progress, headers, report or more. See the ROBOCOPY documentation for those options. Also try use the /TEE switch if to grab any console output from the ROBOCOPY command.