Question

I was researching about multi-tenancy and multi-instance approaches and chose a hybrid.

I keep a single instance of my ASP.Net MVC 2 application but clone the database structure for each client. I am using LINQ to SQL.

Right now, I have one instance of both so just a single connection string is working.

I am planning to expand it for many clients.

I can write code to create a clone of the database structure, create a db user and give permissions whenever a new client signs up. I also will save all these details (db name, db user, allowed app users) in a table.

But how can I make the app use a different database based on who is logged in?

I can’t even figure out the approach I should take to do this. Should I programmatically add connection string to web.config? Is there another way to do this?

Answer 1

One of the constructors for DataContext accepts the connection string. You can assemble this string based on the user for the specific request.

This will override the default connection.