Question

I have the following in my web.config:

<configuration>
  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="strConDev" connectionString="Data Source=dbSource;Initial     Catalog=CatalogInitial;User Id =DEFAULT; Password=PASSWORD" />
  </connectionStrings>
</configuration>

I am trying to retrieve the connection string in my global.asa in the Application_Start method with the following code:

        var con = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["strConDev"];
        string strConn = con.ConnectionString;

However, this is always returning a null value to con. What am I doing wrong here? This is the syntax I was able to find online.

Answer 1

The syntax all appears correct. A couple things you can try:

• Copy/paste the connection name from web.config into your code to ensure the names match correctly.
• Ensure the web.config is correctly formatted. Open it, give the compiler a few seconds to verify it, then check your error list for any warnings. i.e. You may have incorrectly typed <connectionStrings> or you may not have added elements into the correct sections
• Are you publishing the website or debugging it? If publishing, ensure you don’t have any transformations changing the web.config connection strings – verify this by checking the publish location and opening the web.config there to see if it matches your original.