Question

i use EF5 code-first and set my initializers in the config. I want to use more than one database of the same context-type in one application. My connection strings look as follows:

<add name="DatabaseProduction" connectionString="Server=localhost; Database=DatabaseProduction; User Id=***; password=***" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>
<add name="DatabaseTest" connectionString="Server=localhost; Database=DatabaseTest; User Id=***; password=***" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>

I can use my contexts in the code like this

var _contextProd = new MyContext("DatabaseProduction");
var _contextTest = new MyContext("DatabaseTest");

The normal way to set the database initializer is the config file as explained here. But as far as i understand i can set the initializer on a per-context basis but not one for each connection string. Wrong?

The question is: How to set e.g. a DropCreateAllwaysInitializer for the Test Database while having a CreateDatabaseIfNotExistsInitializer on the Production Database?

============ Edit in answer to Gert’s comment and for clearification ============

The way i usually define my Initializers is

<contexts>
  <context type=" Namespace.MyContext, MyAssembly">
    <databaseInitializer type="Namespace.MyCustomContextInitializer, MyAssembly" />
  </context>
</contexts>

And I could for sure add a second <context...> here and define the initializer for another context. But how to tell which initializer is used at which connection string? My problem in other words:

1. The connection string has no knowledge about which context is there.
2. the context (in the context section) has no knowledge at which connection string it is linked
3. In code behind i tell the context which connection string to use
4. the initializer for a particular context seems to be kind of static for each context type.

Again, how do i define a particular initializer for a pair of context and connection string?

Answer 1

The only way I can think of is to derive a context for each of your connection strings:

public class MyProductionContext : MyContext
{
  public MyProductionContext()
    : base( "DatabaseProduction" )
  {
  }
}

and

public class MyTestContext : MyContext
{
  public MyTestContext()
    : base( "DatabaseTest" )
  {
  }
}

You can then set your initializers for each of the derived contexts.