Connecting to a database on an ISP

If you’re an ASP developer working with a commercial Internet service provider (ISP), you often don’t know the physical path of the files you upload, including your database file or files. If your ISP doesn’t define a DSN for you or is slow to do so, you must find another way to create the connections to your database files. One alternative is to create a DSN-less connection to a database file, but you can define such a connection only if you know the physical path of the database file on the ISP’s server.

This section describes how you can obtain the physical path of a database file on a server by using the MapPath method of the ASP server object. The section covers the following topics:

• Understanding physical and virtual paths
• Finding a file’s physical path with the virtual path
• Using a virtual path to connect to a database

  NOTE

  The techniques discussed in this chapter apply only if your database is file-based, such as a Microsoft Access database where data is stored in an .mdb file.