When updating a project to use LINQ to SQL, I found an issue with deploying to multiple environments.  Each environment (development, staging, live) had its’ own database associated with this.  Since I had the .dbml in another assembly, it was only reading from the app.config in the assembly it resided in.  I was storing the database connection string in the web.config of the project so I thought it would be nice to just use that instead of the app.config.

The first thing I needed to do was to keep the .dbml file from reading from the app.config.  After opening up the .dbml file, I opened the properties window for the file.  In the properties window, there is a setting for “Connection”.  In the “Connection” dropdown I selected the “(None)” selection.  That keeps the .dbml file from accessing the app.config for the database connection string.

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The "Connection" setting in the .dbml Properties

Now I needed to get my MainDataContext to use the Web.Config connection string.  For this I created a partial class for my MainDataContext and created a constructor that passed the connection string from the Web.Config.

public partial class MainDataContext
{
    public MainDataContext()
        : base(System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["Database.connection.string.from.web.config"].ToString(), mappingSource)
    {
        OnCreated();
    }
}

Now when I deploy to different environments the .dbml file is accessing the correct database instead of the same one from the app.config.

Tags: ASP.NET, C#, LINQ, LINQ to SQL, csharp, web.config

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 8:18 pm and is filed under ASP.NET, C#, Development, LINQ. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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