Hi,
I have built up a fairly extensive application which contains about 30 screens and 11 tables. I have come to the point in its development where I need to associate each user with their own data contained in these tables. I read through Chapter 17 in "Beginning ASP.NET 4" where individual records in a certain file were associated with each user for editing. While I suppose I could follow this idea in my case, this seems like an awful lot of possibly error prone work. I was hoping there was some way in which the user's ID could be mapped to a unique connection string in the web.config table. I have not found any literature describing such an approach. Does anyone know if there is one or an equivalent "bulk" mapping?
Incidentally I use both SQL and LINQ methods to access the data.

Hi there,

it's very common to have a single database for all users, and then map that data to each user. Many "multi-tentant" systems are built that way.

If you do want to use a connection string per user, you can change the one being used at run time. How, depends on your data access strategy. For a SqlDataSource control you can set its ConnectionString property: See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...vs.110%29.aspx and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5BQT1vo5sc and https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q...n+time&spell=1

However, be aware of the overhead this solution brings. Each user now needs a user account and possible a license in SQL Server as well. I would prefer the multi-tenant solution.

Cheers,

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
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Author of Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 : in C# and VB, Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix
and Beginning ASP.NET 4 : in C# and VB.
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Thank you Imar. I better roll up my sleeves!