As a follow on from this question I’m building a custom server control to be placed on a Sharepoint 2010 master page.
The idea behind this is that it will display a menu that is dynamically populated from the database.
As this is a server control, I’m building it in a dll but I’ve run into a small snag. As it has to connect to the database, I need to store the connection string somewhere (and have it able to be configured based on target configuration (dev/test/prod).
I was intending to the user the Entity Framework as my ORM but i’m confused as to where the connection string is to be stored. In a normal ASP.NET web app it goes in the web.config, but this is a server control in a external DLL.
Where do I store the connection string so that I can just build and deploy the assembly containing the server control.
EDIT:
Before I post a bounty, I have tried using an embedded resource XML file to hold the connection string and while this works, I’m curious as to if this is best practice/a better way?
I would recommend against having the control connect to the database. Instead, the user of the control should connect to the database, and then databind to the control.