[RESOLVED] How to get the Application Path from DAL layer?

[jcis]

First i'll explain that i want to get the Application Path from DAL layer because i don't want to hardcode the path to my Access Database file, i can use the Settings in DAL dll to store values that won't change like database file name but Path is not always the same, it depends on installation folder. Also, I cannot use Application.StartUpPath because i'm in a DLL, not in the EXE.

I found this way is close to what i want, but the problem is that this returns the DLL file path, not the Application file path, so if the DLL is in Windows/System32 instead of the Application Path then this won't work, the blue line gets the path:

      Dim connectionString As String
      Dim lPath As String = New Uri(Assembly.GetAssembly(Me.GetType).CodeBase).LocalPath
      connectionString = "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=" & lPath & _
                    "\base\" & My.Settings.DB_NAME & ";Persist Security Info=False;"

[jmcilhinney]

If you were going to use the Assembly class then you would call Assembly.GetEntryAssembly to get an Assembly object that represents the entry point for the current process, i.e. the EXE. You wouldn't use the Assembly class though. All you need is this:

connectionString = "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=|DataDirectory|\base\" & My.Settings.DB_NAME & ";Persist Security Info=False;"

By the way, what's the point of setting Persist Security Info to False when there's no security to persist and you're presumably not persisting the connection string anyway?

[jcis]

Wow, that "|DataDirectory|" thingy is pretty handy, works perfectly.

About the "Persist Security..." part of the ConnectionString, i just copy-pasted it from ConnectionString.com to my code, I see you're absolutely right, i don't even need that.

Thank you very much JM!

[jmcilhinney]

FYI, |DataDirectory| resolves to the App_Data directory for ASP.NET apps and for ClickOnce apps it automatically resolves to the special folder managed by ClickOnce for data files. For other apps, it resolves to the program folder by default but you can change that in code if you like. That allows you to do things like use the common application data folder on every machine while still just using |DataDirectory| in a connection string stored in the config file.