BACKGROUND:
Most of my programs use table adapters, and the connection strings are stored in app settings. This works fine, but was a real PITA when switching from development to production environment. I had to change manually the connection strings before and after starting my work on any app.
After a bit of research I found how to switch connection strings for table adapters dynamically. By simply adding a custom property for connectionString, I was able to acheive this. But I still have to add code in the new event for each application so the connection strings get switched when it loads. (My connection strings are kept as an app property setting in a common DLL. I just keep one copy of the DLL with my connection strings locally, and one copy o the DLL with the production connection strings on the production server.)
NEW PROBLEM
I’d like to take this one step further and have either have the datasets change the connection strings for all table adapters they each contain when they load using the new event, or do the same from a VB module. I may have up to 3 datasets at any one time.
I do depend a lot on intellisense to help me determine which methods and properties are available, but I can not find a way to retrieve a list of the table adapters in my datasets. It does not appear that they are a part of any collection of objects as far as I can tell. I’ve searched a quite bit for a solution, but no luck.
Marshall
You might want to reconfigure the location of the connection strings. Make your presentation layer (i.e. the application) contain the connection string in it’s app.config. Now here’s the cool part … any .DLL that is being used by the application can access the application’s app.config using the ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings(“MyConnectionString”).ToString function. Your .DLL would call the connection string by name, and the call propagates up to the application’s app.config. If you don’t want to hard code “MyConnectionString”, then you should simply pass the connection string to the .DLL via a property of an object.
If you DON’T want to rearrange the connection string “ownership”, simply expose the .DLL’s connection string from it’s own config file via a static object in the .DLL which the application can read. Assign that to the TableAdapters.
As a side note, if you are already familiar and comfortable with what appears to be your custom DLL’s, move all of the data access logic into its own DLL as a Data Access Layer (DAL) – get the data access logic out of the presentation layer!