We've been asked several times, what is the right way of using connection strings from the configuration file, so that Telerik Reports would work both in run time and design time. The answer can be found in this new Knowledge Base article:

Using connectionStrings from configuration file

It is worth mentioning that the Report and Data Source Wizards do this automatically when instructed to save the selected connection string in the config file.
A working solution using the approach from the latter article can be found in our Visual Studio examples.

Enjoy!

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Steve...

Phew! That's a long blog post title, but hopefully it clearly conveys what I'm about to show you. In my last post, I talked about where you should set your OpenAccess database connection strings. I showed you how you can define multiple database connections in your web.config (or app.config), simulating the idea of having a unique connection string for DEV, TEST, and PROD environments.

So now that you have your connection strings set in a way that is easy to maintain, you need a way to easily to tell your OpenAccess persistent classes to use a specific connection at runtime. Let's look...

When you start working with OpenAccess, one of the first tasks you're going to face is the need set a connection string to your database. And odds are, the connection string you're going to start with is not going to be the connection string your going to use on your production server. It might not even be the connection string your going to use in your test environment. Point is, you need to be able to store multiple connection strings and easily "cue" OpenAccess to use the correct connection details at runtime. Fortunately, OpenAccess makes this easy.

UNDERSTANDING OPENACCESS CONNECTIONS

First things first:...