How to specify the Data Source in a connection string? - asp.net-mvc

Question

updated question
How do I specify the data source to my local MSSQL server?
<connectionStrings>
<add name="DefaultConnection" connectionString="Data Source=(localhost)\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=bladb;Integrated Security=true" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
</connectionStrings>
I keep getting a "data source not found" exception no matter what I try.

Answer 1

Yep. Your application needs to know the location of the database, the username, and password to authenticate with.
You call this a magic string but I don't know what other magic method you are thinking of where your application could automatically know the IP Address of your database, the Username, and the Password.
Most of the time when you setup your database they create this connection string for you so you can just copy and paste it in. It is just a one time thing so it shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Answer 2

You don't put parenthesis around localhost; it's just for (local) or (LocalDb)\v11.0. For localhost, it would be: DataSource=localhost for the default, unnamed local database (if one exists, which is not necessarily) or DataSource=localhost\SQLExpress for the default named installation of SQL-Server Express.
See http://www.connectionstrings.com/ for more info.

Answer 3

if you define your connection string section in the web.config as
<connectionStrings configSource="connections.config"/>
It will point to a separate config file, just containing the connection strings.
You can then add connection strings in code via the code below.
Note the advantage of this is that is does not have to reboot the website. Happy days...
using (StreamWriter writer = File.CreateText(#"c:\code\AVIVA_site\connections.config"))
{
writer.WriteLine("<connectionStrings>");
for (int i = 0; name.Length > i; i++)
{
writer.WriteLine("<add name=\"{0}\" connectionString=\"{1}\" providerName=\"{2}\" />", name[i], conString[i], provider[i]);
}
writer.WriteLine("</connectionStrings>");
writer.Close();
}

Answer 4

For the love of god...
if (!WebSecurity.Initialized)
{
WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection(
"DefaultConnection",
"Users",
"UserId",
"UserName",
true);
}
Instead of adding "DefaultConnection" I added the Configuration.ConnectionStrings["DefaultConnection"] instead.
The problem wasn't in the connection string in the web.config, but in the initializedatabase call...