Using Connection Strings with Telerik OpenAccess ORM

As you might already found out, with the 2009 Q3 release of Telerik OpenAccess ORM we made the first step of providing an easier and more natural way of defining database connection settings for your applications. In other words, OpenAccess now supports standard ADO.NET connection strings. The aim of this post is to brief you how to use them with the product.

To use Telerik OpenAccess ORM in a Visual Studio project, you should run the Enable project wizard first. A detailed article on how to use the wizard can be found in our documentation. Let’s just see what is new in this release.

If you “enable” a Class Library project and go to page 3 of the wizard, you will notice that there are two options – Use standard connection strings and Use OpenAccess connection settings. Select the second one and you will see the well-known connection settings from the previous versions. However, if you switch to the new settings, a combobox with the active database connections will show up. You can create a new connection as well, using the button on the right. A new dialog will help you to set up and test the connection.

When you are done, click Next and Finish the wizard.

Enabling web sites

Another scenario that should be mentioned is enabling a web project. Currently generating and keeping persistent classes in such projects is not allowed (something we are going to change very soon) and the classes should take place in additional assembly. Having this in mind, you do not need to set up a connection for the web project. What you can do however, is to choose a connection string that will override the connection set in the class model project. In this case, page 3 of the wizard shows all available connection strings from the projects in the solution that are already “enabled”.

You can use one of them, define a custom one or just pass this step by selecting None. If necessary, the connection string can be found and manually edited in the Web.config file, under the <connectionStrings> section.

We hope this functionality will make configuring and deploying OpenAccess based applications much easier and user-friendly.