• OK, I doubled up on the slashes within the path, and put four slashes at the beginning to indicate the UNC path. My expression evaluates to this.

    \\johnson\clientFTP\users\UBM\ATOM\GEN_V2_DAT_ENT_IUXA9_PRE_20121101_888888.txt

    I set the connection using this variable to delay validation as the file won't exist until I do the export. I set TextQUalifier to ", ColumnNamesInFirstDataRow to True, Format is Delimited, but don't see where to indicate that it is comma-delimited.

    I set ValidateExternalMetadata in the DataFlow task to false - this file will be created at runtime.

    I am getting this error (abbreviated)

    Error at Export DAT [SSIS.Pipeline]: "component "Source - DAT view" (1)" failed validation and returned validation status "VS_NEEDSNEWMETADATA".

    What can I do to make this work?

    I'm using a variable to hold an expression that will set the file name at runtime then export data to the new file name.

    Can you advise me?

    Colleen

    One way to get round this is to create a dummy version of the file eg

    \\johnson\clientFTP\users\UBM\ATOM\template.txt

    and put the column headings and (say) one row of data in there.

    Point your connection at this. Of course, it will be overridden at runtime, but SSIS will still use it for meta data purposes at design time.

    If you haven't even tried to resolve your issue, please don't expect the hard-working volunteers here to waste their time providing links to answers which you could easily have found yourself.