ADO.NET Cookbook

1.5. Connecting to an Access Databasefrom ASP.NET

Problem

You know your connection string is correct, but still can’t connect to your Microsoft Access database from your ASP.NET application. What are the differences between connecting from a Windows Forms .NET application and an ASP.NET application?

Solution

You must grant the necessary file permissions for accessing a Jet database (Microsoft’s transparent data access engine) to the default user account used by ASP.NET.

Discussion

When a user retrieves a page from an ASP.NET web site, code runs on the server to generate and deliver the page. By default, IIS (Internet Information Server) uses the system account to provide the security context for all processes. This account can access the IIS computer, but is not allowed to access network shares on other computers.

To allow an ASP.NET application to connect to a Microsoft Access database, IIS must be configured to use an account other than the system account. The new account must be configured to have permission to access all files and folders needed to use the Access database. If the Access database is on a remote computer, the account also requires access to that computer.

The following sections describe how to configure the IIS Server and the Access computer to allow ASP.NET to connect to an Access database.

Configure IIS

The system account cannot authenticate across a network. Enable impersonation in the web.config file for a given ASP.NET application so that ASP.NET impersonates ...