SSIS Substring Error Using Case When with Right Function - ssis

Question

I am using Below code in my derived column of SSIS to remove title in Name column such as Mr,Mrs,Ms and Dr.
Ex:-
Mr ABC
MS XYZX
Mrs qwrer
DR ADCS
SO I am removing the title of the name.
SUBSTRING( [Name] , 1, 3)=="Mr" && LEN( [Name] ) >2 ? RIGHT([Name],LEN([Name])-2)
But getting Error as incomplete token or invalid statement.
Please help.
any other suggestion to remove the prefixes are also welcome but need to Use transformation.

Answer 1

A different way to think about the problem is that you want to look at the first "word" in the column Name where "word" is the collection of characters from the start of the string to the first space.
String matching in SSIS is case-sensitive so you'll want to force the first word to lower/upper case - however your master list of titles is cased (and then ensure the title list is all lower/upper case).
I am an advocate of making life easier on yourself so I'll add a Derived Column, actually lots of derived columns, that will identify the position of the first space in Name and I'll call this FirstSpace
DER GetFirstSpace
Add a new column, called FirstSpace. The expression we want to use is FINDSTRING
FINDSTRING([Name], " ", 1)
That will return the position of the first instance of a space (or zero if no space was found).
DER GetFirstWord
Add another derived column after the DER GetGetFirstSpace. We need to do this so we can inspect the values we're passing to get the first word. Do it all in a single Derived column and when you get something wrong, you won't be able to debug it and the real cost of development is maintenance. New column, FirstWord will be type DT_WSTR 4000 because that's what happens when you use the string manipulation expressions. I am going to force this to upper case as I'll need it later on.
UPPER(SUBSTRING([Name], 1, [FirstSpace]))
TODO: Verify whether that will be "DR" or "DR " with trailing space as I'm currently coding this by memory.
TODO: What happens if FirstSpace is 0 - we might need to make use of ternary operator ?:
At this point in the data flow, we have a single word in a column named FirstWord what we need to do is compare that to our list of known titles and if it exists, strip it from the original. And that's an interesting problem.
DER GetIsTitleMatched
Add yet another Derived column, this time to solve whether we've matched our list of titles. This will be a boolean type column named IsTitleMatched
[FirstWord] == "DR" || [FirstWord] == "MRS" || [FirstWord] == "MR" || [FirstWord] == "MS"
Following that pattern "FirstWord is exactly equal literal text OR..." when this derived column evaluates, we'll know whether the first word is something to be removed (finally)
DER SetFinalName
Here we're going to add yet another column, NameFinal The magic of stripping out the bad word will be that we use the RIGHT expression starting at the position of that opening space and going to the end of the word. You might need to add a left TRIM in there based on whether the RIGHT operation is inclusive of the starting point or not. Again, free handing at the moment so good but no guarantee of perfection.
(IsTitleMatched) ? RIGHT([Name], [FirstSpace]) : [Name]
I do violate my own rule here as I have a quasi complex expression there in the positive case. Feel free to insert a derived column task that computes the stripped version of the name.
At this point, you've got 4 to 5 derived columns in your data flow but you can add a data viewer between each to ensure you're getting the expected result. You're welcome to solve this in your own manner but that's the easiest approach I can think of.