This chapter is about working with databases.
In this chapter we will:
With Web Pages, you can easily display data from a database.
You can connect to an existing database, or create a new database from scratch.
In this example we will connect to an existing SQL Server Compact database.
If you want to learn how to create a database for your web, please go to the chapter Web Database.
In the "DemoWebPages" folder, create a new CSHTML file named "Products.cshtml".
Replace the code in the file with the code from the example below:
The Database.Open(name) method will connect to a database in two steps:
First, it searches the application's App_Data folder for a database that matches the name parameter without the file-name extension.
If no file is found, it looks for a "connection string" in the application's Web.config file.
(A connection string contains information about how to connect to a database. It can include a file path, or the name of an SQL database, with full user name and password)
This two-step search makes it possible to test the application with a local database, and run the application on a web host using a connection string.