absolutely, the issue wasnt so much how to do it, but how to automat it for 1000 + columns. Not something anyone wants to do one by one.

In the end I generated a dynamic insert statement form system tables to insert one row maxing out all data lengths (all varchar), exported it and used it as a dummy fikle to autop detect. Bit of a pain but not as bad as the alternative!

What would have been ideal is to be able to automatically use the target tables dt's as the source dt's. The table was built from the file spec so they are identical max lengths.