Connecting to a database on an ISP

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


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