Available on GitHub SSIS Expression Editor & Tester. (Links updated, Sep 2019.)
About five years ago I developed my own expression editor control. It first got used in our custom tasks as the MS editor didn’t become available until SQL 2005 SP1, but even then it had some handy features I preferred. For example resizable panes so that if your expression result was more than two lines you could see them all. It also meant I could change the functions available in the tree view, the most obvious use being to add some handy snippets and samples that I used a lot. This quickly developed into a small expression testing tool. I’d develop complex expressions using my editor and then copy it back into the package itself.
I have been meaning to make the tool available for some time and finally made the effort, the code is checked-in and the signed downloads are published on GitHub.
There are two flavours, SQL 2005 or 2008, and just a simple zip file to download and extract. The tool doesn’t need installing, and is completely portable. It does need SSIS to be installed on the local machine though.
Each zip file contains two files:
ExpressionTester.exe – The tool itself, run this.
ExpressionEditor.dll – The reusable editor control.
This also used in the BI Developer Extensions add-in, in particular see the variable window extensions feature.
The editor is available as a single assembly that you can reference yourself. Just add a reference to the ExpressionEditor.dll assembly and you should be up and running in no time. There is a sample project Package Test in the source code which shows how to use the editor control form in it’s simplest form, or if you want to host control directly then the tester tool is a perfect example.