December 0801

Configuring MyGeneration to work with SQL Express file

I've been getting into NHibernate recently, mostly due to the fantastic videos by Steve Bohlen on Summer of NHibernate and one of the cool things that he shows (in screencast 8 - Effective Techniques for Database-Driven Modeling) is how to generate your entities and mappings with MyGeneration

However I struggled a bit with getting the connection to the SQL Express file that is part of a Windows Form application I'm working on. I should say that my normal approach is to mount the mdf in SQL Server, however in this case I don't want the "fun and games" involved with trying to deploy the database this way, preferring the freedom of a transportable file. It's been a while since I had to manually write a connection string but there are plenty of places online that provide example connection strings to remind me of the syntax. Even with this help I was struggling though, so checked the MyGeneration fourms, but there didn't seem to be anything to help me there.

So fiddled a bit more with MyGeneration (1.3.0.3) and got my connection to work. For anyone else struggling with this here's how to it:

  • Click the OLEDB... button to launch
    Data Link Properties Provider panel
  • From the Data Link Properties dialogue box selecte the OLE DB Provider for Microsoft Directory Services and click Next >>
  • Enter ".\SQLExpress" for the Data Source (assuming you have a standard install of SQL Express.Connection panel of the Data Link Properties dialogue
  • In the location text box paste the path to your mdf
  • Select the method needed to connect to your file. I'm using Windows NT Integrated security
  • Click the Test Connection button, it should succeed. You are now ready to use MyGeneration with your SQL Express mdf

This produced the following connection string:
Provider=ADsDSOObject;Encrypt Password=False;Integrated Security=SSPI;Data Source=.\SQLExpress;Location=C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\MyProject\src\app\OTJ.Program\OTJDB.mdf;Mode=Read;Bind Flags=0;ADSI Flag=-2147483648

Hope that helps someone, it took me long enough fiddling!

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Comments

  1. Augusto Brazil Augusto (Saturday, January 24, 2009) #

    Worked perfectly!

    Thanks a lot!

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