Question

I store the path of my database (a folder with some xml files) in the app.config. At the startup I check, if the path exists. If it doesn’t exist, I want to set the path to the default path. Code looks like this:

public void CheckAndRepairSettings()
{
        /* Check Paths */
        if(GetDatabasePath() == null)
             SetDatabasePath(System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory + "DataBase");
}

GetDatabasePath() reads the path form the app.config and SetDatabasePath() writes the path to the app.config. These Methods are working fine.

My promblem is the System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory. If I run this in my applications debug mode I get:
“F:\Office\Projekte_Software\ServiceTool\_Work\ServiceSoftware\ServiceSoftware\bin\Debug\”

I additionally use NUnit for some unit tests. If I run NUnit in debug mode I get :
“F:\Office\Projekte_Software\ServiceTool\_Work\ServiceSoftware\ServiceSoftware.UnitTests\bin\Debug”

There is no trailing Backslash “\” in the path in NUnit debug mode, so I get a non existing path when I concatenate the path-string in my CheckAndRepairSettings().

Why does this behave so different?

Answer 1

You should use Path.Combine to concatenate paths, it handles issues regarding existing/non-existing (among other things) path separators

Why one includes ending slash the other one doesn’t is probably related to how nUnit creates the appdomain under which it runs its tests