programmatic database access

[williamphenryjr]

This is a long post. If you have answers I'm ready. If you have web
links, that'd be great too. I'm a Junior/Senior in Computer Science at
Washington State University, so you can make some assumptions about
terminology I'll be familiar with based on that.

I am trying to write a class that will abstract out database access
stuff for my application. This class will be called DBUtil
I will use this class to do the gruntwork for a custom membership
provider. I will call this class CustMemProvider .
I need help with two things. First I need help with the web.config
file. Second I need help with the programmatic access of the database.
***First, the web.config stuff: My problem with the web.config file is
that I don't understand most of the naming stuff that goes on in it.
Specifically with the ' name="<what??>" ' tag. I need to know what to
name the database. Also I need to know what to name the membership
provider when it appears in the web.config membership provider tag. I
need to know what the ConnectionStrin g should say as well. (I've seen
the fields for these tags, but never seen a good explanation of them.)

***Now on to the custom class stuff: In my DBUtil class I will have a
static string to hold the connectionStrin g for the connection setup. I
will hard-code the query string into each individual function. These
functions will return DataSets (to make it easier to pass the DataSet
reference out to the page) or booleans.

I prefer to use email to uniquely identify users, so I'll write my own
custom validation code as well. I need help figuring out what to do
with that. I'm assuming it's a predefined interface from the required
base class, but I need to change the fields around to pass in an email
instead of the default username, and then, of course, the password.
Also, I need to see code for the setup of a connection and the running
of a query from my module.

Is there a way to make a script or something that sets up my database
and tables when it's run? I'm thinking about future installation needs.
***As an afterthought... what the heck are stored procedures and how do
I make one?

Thank you for your help.
--
williamphenryjr

--
William
www.williamphenryjr.com
--
"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes
off your goal."-Henry Ford
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[Chris Fulstow]

William,

There's a custom membership provider example on MSDN that might help:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/44w5aswa.aspx

It includes an example web.config that's configured to use the
provider, hopefully it demonstrates some of the different membership
configuration elements.

Stored Procedures:

A stored procedure is just a program stored within a database. It's
usually, but not always, a sequence of SQL queries, although SQL Server
2005 now supports stored procedures written in any .NET language, such
as C# or VB 2005.

SPs are usually faster than regular queries because they can be
compiled and have more direct access to your database objects. They
can be useful for encapsulating data access logic inside the database.
It's also more secure to us SPs because you are better protected from
SQL injection attacks.

SQL Data Definition Language (DDL) scripts:

It's possible to write DDL scripts in SQL that create database objects.
For example:
- CREATE TABLE
- ALTER TABLE
- CREATE INDEX
- etc.

Connection Strings:

For loads of great examples of connection strings, check out:
http://www.connectionstrings.com/

HTH,

Chris

[williamphenryjr]

Thanks Chris! Very helpful! You've definitely pointed me in the right
direction!
--
williamphenryjr

--
William
www.williamphenryjr.com
--
"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes
off your goal."-Henry Ford
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