I have a Visual Studio 2010 Solution that contains three projects:
- A Windows Service which will read Data from a SQLite Database to perform actions
- A Winforms App which will provide a method of configuring the behaviour of the Service (by updating the SQLite Database)
- A Class Library Project to abstract all database access away from the service and the config app (making it easier in the future to update anything having to do with the database without having to hunt down queries in the other two projects)
All of these projects are in the same solution, and I have added references from the Winforms App and the Service to the class library. In both projects I am able to see the classes from the class library and interact with them, but I am having an issue. I have created the database in the /Resources/ directory of my class library project (because to me the “common” project is the only sensible place to store the common database), however whenever I attempt to access the database in the Winforms app, it is not returning data that I know is in there. Since System.Data.SQLite has the default behaviour of creating an empty database file if the file isn’t found (an odd choice in my opinion), I can’t even go back and tell if the database exists or not.
This leads me to suspect that I am not understanding properly how files from one project are referenced in another. Here is what my project looks like:
WorkModeCommon Contains the classes SQLiteDatabase and ScheduleManager, where ScheduleManager has a SQLiteDatabase() and SQLiteDatabase interacts with Resources/WorkModeSchedules.s3db
Both the WorkModeConfigApp and the WorkModeService have a WorkModeCommon.ScheduleManager(), which should in theory take care of all of the database interaction.
Do I have a major flaw in my design, or could someone point me to a resource which could help me solve the problem I’m having?
Ok folks, I’ve solved my problem. What I did is include a copy of the DB file in each project, and set the “Copy To Output Directory” property on all but one of those instances (the “Common” project) to “Do Not Copy”. After that I changed the output directory for all three projects to the same directory (more specifically, I created centralized Debug and Release directories and pointed the proper build configurations to the proper directories). I am now able to test successfully using a single DB file and a centralized class library!