ADF Copy activity enforce data type to be string in the mapping

Question

I'm trying to enforce a property data type to be a string with ADF's copy activity.

I assume I would add this enforcement within the mapping section:

For example, I want to enforce the 'name' property to be a string instead of type 'any'. Is it possible for me to enforce this type of mapping for the copy activity? I am forced to use the copy activity because I'm using S3 as my source. I'm aware that this type mapping can be enforced using data flows within ADF but data flows don't currently support S3 as a source.

Answer 1

I tried to repro this issue. I have used CSV file as Source and SQL database as Sink.

As you can see, ADF reads the data from source and determine the source schema and maps with Sink schema.

In my case, Copy activity was performed from Tabular source to tabular sink.

Currently such data type conversion is supported when copying between tabular data. Hierarchical sources/sinks are not supported, which means there is no system-defined data type conversion between source and sink interim types.

This feature works with the latest dataset model. If you don't see this option from the UI, try creating a new dataset.

Refer - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/copy-activity-schema-and-type-mapping#data-type-mapping