Category: best practices

I have the opportunity to work on some pretty old code . There were many projects , all that had a sort of connection string to the database.  This kind of code were in like > 11 places :

string connectionstring = “Data Source=.\\SqlServer;Initial Catalog=myDB;Integrated Security=SSPI;”;

The task was to modify this in something that could read from a config ( json) file . But more than that, was to verify
1.that is called everywhere – because sometimes it were in methods, other time in a static variable and so on .
2. that the json exists or not ( if not return the default string – but log the fact that are not in the settings)

So – how to monitor that your code is actually hit ? One idea is to make breakpoints. Other is to make a class:

So I came up with this class

public class ConnectionSql
{
public ConnectionSql(
[CallerMemberName] string memberName = "",
[CallerFilePath] string sourceFilePath = "",
[CallerLineNumber] int sourceLineNumber = 0)
{

Trace.WriteLine("member name: " + memberName);
Trace.WriteLine("source file path: " + sourceFilePath);
Trace.WriteLine("source line number: " + sourceLineNumber);
}
//TODO: if need speed, make this static - or strConnection...
public string ConnectionString()
{
var strConnection = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["sql"];
if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(strConnection))
{
Console.WriteLine("not found connection sql string in settings , going to default");
strConnection = ".\\SqlServer;Initial Catalog=myDB;Integrated Security=SSPI;";
}
return strConnection;

}

}

How we call ?

string connectionstring = new ConnectionSql().ConnectionString();

Because of the attributes https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/concepts/caller-information we can figure by looking at the trace if the code was hit or not and by which line.