I have been using an easy approach for adding an SSIS Package to an SSIS Project for a couple of years now. But didn't get a chance to actually blog about it. Today I decided to blog it for sure and here I go.

Often there will be more than one option for doing many things in our day to day life and quite often the approach which we discover lately turns out to be an easy & simple approach.

Adding an existing SSIS Package from file system to an SSIS Project is no different. There are basically two different approaches for doing this - The Hard Approach & an Easy Approach.

Hard Approach:

• Right click on the "SSIS Packages" folder in the SSIS project in SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and Select "Add Existing Package" from the context menu.
• In the "Add Copy of Existing Package" dialog box select "Package location" as "File System" from the dropdown.
• Click on the ellipsis button next to the "Package path" textbox.
• Locate the SSIS package (.dtsx file) which you want to add from the file system.
• Click OK in the "Add Copy of Existing Package" dialog box to finish adding the package.

Easy Approach:

• Locate the SSIS package (.dtsx file) which you want to add from the file system.
• Right click on the SSIS package in the file system and select "Copy" from the context menu (copy the package).
• Right click on the "SSIS Package" folder in the SSIS project in SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS).
• Select "Paste" from the context menu to finish adding the package.

Hope you will find this tip usful.