Question

Good Day,

I have two connection strings defined in my web.config file.

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="AppDb" connectionString="CONNECTION-STRING1"/>
    <add name="LaptopDb" connectionString="CONNECTION-STRING2" />
</connectionStrings>

When I am working on my desktop, I want to use the connection string “AppDb”. When I am working on my laptop, I want to use the connection string “LaptopDb”. I don’t want to comment out the line on the connection string everytime I work on a different machine.

I know that I can programatically do this. I’m just trying to figure out the best way.

Something like:

if (machineName == desktop)
     use AppDb
else
     use LaptopDb

but I don’t like this approach. Is there something else I can test on?

Answer 1

Here’s another couple of approaches you could consider:

• You can use the configSource attribute to read the configuration for that element from another file, the contents of which can be different on each machine:

  http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2007/04/26/using-configsource-to-split-configuration-files.aspx

• Or you can use different build configurations and use XDT to transform the web.config file.