The Problem:
For one reason or another you need to set the database used by entity framework programatically. The more common way of doing such a thing is to set the database in your web.config class, but for whatever reason you need to set it in actual C# code.
The Cause:
There is no cause really, it is merely the way that entity framework and sql server work together.
The Solution:
The answer lies in setting the constructor properly.
Example Code Using Entity Framework and Data Context
using System.Data.Entity;
namespace MyDBServerExperiments.Models
{
public class DTFContext : DbContext
{
public DTFContext() : base(“Data Source=MyDBServer.DBServer.com;Initial Catalog=MyEntityFrameworkDB;Persist Security Info=True;user id=MyUsername; Password=MyPassword;”) { }public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }
public DbSet<BusinessObjects> BusinessObjects { get; set; }
public DbSet<Property> Properties { get; set; }}
}
The above would be your data context file that uses the DBContext file in your models folder, just fyi (that is the common place for Entity Framework models in the standard Visual Studio 2010 web solution structure).
Note, everything happens in the constructor. This give you many interesting opportunities to programatically swap out Sql Server database names and users, compared to the web.config option, which tends to be far more static. It allows far more extensive use of business objects and
