title: SSIS Custom Column Property
body: <p>I have a general question I'm hoping someone can answer about creating custom properties for use in a Data Flow Component.</p>
  <p>Is it possible to create custom properties for use at the column level? I can create custom properties at the component level, no problem, but that does me no good.</p>
  <p>I want to add two properties (Encrypt and Decrypt) to the Input Column metadata.</p>
  <p>Say I have a collection of Input columns col1, col2, col3. As a developer, I would like to set col3's Encrypt value to true so, at run time, col3 gets encrypted before being loaded into a database.</p>
  <p>I have successfully encrypted and decrypted using a custom component. Still, I used the values &quot;e&quot; and &quot;d&quot; in the column Description and then evaluated that Description during PreExecute. I set a state object based on the value of Description and add it to a collection that is processed during ProcessInput.   I don't think using the Description is a good thing to do, and that is the need for the custom properties.</p>