Nested Parent-Child Packages

I have a fairly simple SSIS project that has nested parent-child packages.
I am trying to find the best way to manage the connections strings so as to make the package portable across machines and environments. Currently there is one "master" package which calls 6 child packages. 1 of these child package calls 3 child packages of its own.

For the database connections, I've settled on creating a standardized .dtsConfig file for each server/login. This is a relatively small number (intially 8) that I don't expect to grow much.

I've taken a different approach for the file-system connections used by Execute Package components that call the child packages. For each package that has child packages, I store all the connection strings (paths) to the child packages in a single .dtsConfig file. This works well for the top-level "master" package where I can pass in the .dtsConfig file (that has the paths to the child packages) as a run-time option in the Execute Package Utility.

However, this approach seems to fall apart for the 2nd generation package that in turn call 3rd generation packages because I don't know how to get the .dtsConfig file (with the 3rd generation .dtsx package paths) path to this downstream dtsx package.

Though I'm sure there are others, the only two solutionsI can think of now are
(a)don't nest packages beyond 1 parent/child relationship -- not really an option or
(b)Store the path of .dtsConfig files for each .dtsx package as an environment variable on each machine. This option is unappealing because it would require adding an environment variable for every .dtsx package that has child packages. I don't think it would take long for this to grow into a large number, that would make managing environment variables cumbersome.

So far my experience with SSIS has been that there was a simple solution for each scenario I had. So this hoop jumping I'm going through seems to indicate I am just missing something.

Is there a better way I am just not getting?

In a similar situation, I put all the 3rd level child packages in the same folder. Then I used a parent package configuration to pass a root path variable from the 1st level master to the second level master. I used an expression on the connectionstring property for each file system connection that concatenated the root path with the name of the package.

It worked pretty well for me, but there are some limits with parent package configurations, since they are evaluated later in the process than other types of configurations (hopefully something that will be addressed in Katmai).

Nested Database Transactions in Forms

This should be a fairly simple question. It's based on this error message:

"Transaction count after EXECUTEindicates that a COMMIT or ROLLBACK TRANSACTION statement is missing.Previous count = 1, current count = 0."

I get this when executing a stored procedure upon processing a form. This error happens when I intentionally provide input to the stored procedure that I know should cause it to error out. I catch the exception, and it contains the error message, but it also contains the above message added on to it, which I don't want.

I won't post the entire stored procedure. But I'll list a digest of it (Just those lines that are significant). Assume that what's included is what happens when I provide bad input:

BEGIN

BEGIN TRY
BEGIN TRANSACTION
RAISERROR('The item selected does not exist in the database.', 16, 1);
COMMIT -- This won't execute when the RAISERROR breaks out to the CATCH block
END TRY

BEGIN CATCH
ROLLBACK
DECLARE @.ErrorSeverity INT, @.ErrorMessage NVARCHAR(4000)
SET @.ErrorSeverity = ERROR_SEVERITY()
SET @.ErrorMessage = ERROR_MESSAGE()
RAISERROR(@.ErrorMessage, @.ErrorSeverity, 1)
END CATCH

END

Okay, so that works fine. The problem is when I execute this with an SqlCommand object, on which I've opened a transaction. I won't include the entire setup of the data (with the parameters, since those seem fine), but I'll give my code that opens the connection and executes the query:

con.Open();
SqlTransaction transaction = con.BeginTransaction();
command.Transaction = transaction;

try
{
command.ExecuteNonQuery();
transaction.Commit();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
transaction.Rollback();
}
finally
{
con.Close();
}

I'm calling the stored procedure listed above (which has its own transaction), using a SqlCommand object on which I've opened a transaction. When there is no error it works fine. But when I give the stored procedure bad data, it gives me that message about the transaction count.

Is there something I need to do in either my SQL or my C# to handle this? The entire message found in the Exception's Message is a concatenation of the message in my RAISERROR, along with the transaction count message I quoted at the beginning.

Thanks,

-Dan

In playing around with it, I've come to learn that the Exception.Message is the concatenation of any messages the exception holds. So, my CATCH block could contain this instead:

Label.Text = String.Format("Error: {0}", ex.Errors[0].Message);

That only gives the first error, which is the one I want (the one specified in RAISERROR). I just don't know if this is what I should do. Is that transaction count message something I should be concerned about, or will that always happen? Should I just use the first message in the exception?

Thanks.