Hi Srecko,

Different connection strings = different cache, so you need to rebuild cache for each connection string.

I would suggest to use 2 instances, or one Umbraco with 2 trees inside, but we don't recommend to use one instance and 2 connection strings definitely.

Thanks,

Alex

The connection string name is a constant in the core, so you can't switch connection strings. I agree you want to sites in the same instance or two different sites.

Thank you both Alex and David for your inputs.

My situation is that I have two instances on the servers (staging and production environments, beside development on my PC) and there's automated tool that promotes content from one environment into the other.

With the current setup by having a single connection string in web.config before promoting site into the production I would need to manually update it to point to the production database. Of course after promotion I would set it back to point to staging database. In order to avoid any discrepancy later in future promotions (which might be done by someone else beside myself, who might forget to modify connection strings during promotion) I was trying to find a solution that would automatically select connections strings from web.config based on the host.

In other applications (not Umbraco) I have simple code as:

var connStringName = "";

var serverName = Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_NAME"];
if (serverName .Contains("stage"))
     connStringName = "dbStage";
else
     connStringName = "dbProduction";

return connStringName;

...which works just fine. Therefore I was wondering if there's a way to override the default "umbracoDbDSN" connection string.

Thanks, Srecko

I would think it is a pretty common requirememt for local db server in dev and different in production. As you say you have the difficulty of syncing the two databases but i would look at this

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6940004/asp-net-web-config-configsource-vs-file-attributes

Provided these are the same website with a configsource for your connection string key you could have different files in each of your environments containing the correct details

Hi,

What I would like to have is to have identical code (in staging and production environment) + two databases (in staging and production environment) where code would know how to switch between databases based on the host. My issue is not to write the code to do that, but to "hijack" the part where umbraco core picks the connection string name.

I'm using compiled version of Umbraco, not the source code.

I've been digging a bit into the source code of Umbraco and I found that connection string name umbracoDbDSN is declared in Umbraco.Core > Configuration > GlobalSettings.cs as...

public const string UmbracoConnectionName = "umbracoDbDSN";

...which "consumed" here... (the same .cs file)

    /// <summary>
    /// Gets the database connection string
    /// </summary>
    /// <value>The database connection string.</value>
    [Obsolete("Use System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[\"umbracoDbDSN\"] instead")]
    public static string DbDsn
    {
        get
        {
            var settings = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[UmbracoConnectionName];
            var connectionString = string.Empty;

            if (settings != null)
            {
                connectionString = settings.ConnectionString;

                // The SqlCe connectionString is formatted slightly differently, so we need to update it
                if (settings.ProviderName.Contains("SqlServerCe"))
                    connectionString = string.Format("datalayer=SQLCE4Umbraco.SqlCEHelper,SQLCE4Umbraco;{0}", connectionString);
            }

            return connectionString;
        }
        set
        {
            if (DbDsn != value)
            {
                if (value.ToLower().Contains("SQLCE4Umbraco.SqlCEHelper".ToLower()))
                {
                    ApplicationContext.Current.DatabaseContext.ConfigureEmbeddedDatabaseConnection();
                }
                else
                {
                    ApplicationContext.Current.DatabaseContext.ConfigureDatabaseConnection(value);
                } 
            }
        }
    }

Thank you for any idea.

Srecko

Interesting, so you haven't access to deploy to live?

is working on a reply...