Setting EF Connection String in Azure Web App

asp.net entity-framework azure azure-sql-database azure-web-app-service
Jacob Foshee picture Jacob Foshee · Jul 1, 2015 · Viewed 7.5k times · Source

We have an ASP .NET (MVC) app and are using Entity Framework 6 to connect to our databases. The DbContext is constructed in a standard way and it loads the connection string on our behalf. The generated code looks like this:

public partial class MyContext : DbContext
{
    public MyContext(string connectionName)
        : base("name=" + connectionName)
    {
    }
}

We set the connection string in a local web.config also in a standard way:

<configuration>
  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="DefaultConnection" 
         connectionString="metadata=...;provider connection string=&quot;...&quot;" 
         providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />

When we publish the app to Azure we navigate to the Azure Portal, then to the Web App's Settings, then to the list of Connection Strings. There we add the EF connection string that we had used locally. When we restart and visit the app we get a run-time error depending on the type of connection string we choose.

For a Custom type we get the following run-time error:

Keyword not supported: 'data source'.

For SQL Server or SQL Database we get the following run-time error:

Keyword not supported: 'metadata'.

This really seems like a straightforward story so we are wondering what is going wrong.

Answer

Jacob Foshee picture Jacob Foshee · Jul 7, 2015

The problem is the escaped quotes: &quot;.

The connection strings in web.config have quotes escaped because they are serialized in an XML attribute. When entering a connection string in the Azure portal you should provide the raw unescaped string. Something like this:

metadata=...;provider connection string="Data Source=..."

David Ebbo's answer is good for confirming that the Environment is set up as you expect. It is also helpful to pay attention to the .pubxml file when publishing via the wizard in Visual Studio: it will try to populate connection strings as well.

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