Question

I am building an application in Visual Studio 2010 using .Net 4.0 and an Access Database.

I’ve specified the existing path of my database i.e. D:/project/record.accdb. After building the application, when I install it on my own computer and run it, it gives me a database path error.

My application is working fine on clicking F5 (Debugging), except that it shows the error

“Path not found.”

I’ve build my project using the following steps:

1. Build
2. Build “project Name”
3. Use CD/DVD for installation
4. Finish

How can I fix this issue?

Answer 1

As it sounds, on your Dev PC it runs fine, but not on a different machine where you want to deploy it to.

Check if you have Microsoft Access installed on the other PC (the one without Dev tools).
Repeat your tests after you have installed Access.

---

Update:
You have written me recently that the path does not work. Try the following to create a valid datasource string:

1. On the desktop, create a new empty text document (right-click, then select New>Text document)
2. Rename that document so it has the extension .UDL, e.g. Access.UDL
3. Double-Click on the file. "Data link properties" opens.
4. Go to the first tab (Provider), select "Microsoft Office XX.X Access Database Engine OLE DB Provider" (where XX.X is the Office version you’re using)
5. Go to the 2nd tab (Connection), in "1. Enter the data source and/or location of the data" you specify the full path to your Access database , e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\My Documents\Database1.accdb
6. Click on the "Test connection" button to ensure your connection succeeds.
7. Close the dialog with "OK".

If you open the UDL file (in our example Access.UDL) using NOTEPAD afterwards, you see the correct datasource string:

[oledb]

; Everything after this line is an OLE DB initstring

Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\My
Documents\Database1.accdb;Persist Security Info=False

You can use this string either directly in the C# code or you store it in your app.config file and load it. If the path should be dynamic you can do the following (the following example uses a hard-coded datasource string):

var strDS=string.Format(
    "Data Source={0}\Database1.accdb;Persist Security Info=False", strPath);

This will insert the path stored in the variable strPath into the datasource string strDS. As mentioned before, you could also load this string from the app.config.