Program ron any Drive letter

[MLNorton]

I have programs that are distribute but all are created on my E drive and that Drive is hard coded into the program when I install ADOConnection.
How can I configure my delphi programs to work on any Drive letter (C.D or any other letter) without any action by the user?

 

[majlumbo]

if you need only the drive that your program is running from then you can use ExtractFileDrive or if you need the entire path then you can use ExtractFilePath

var
   Drive: String;
   DriveAndPath: String;
begin
   Drive := ExtractFileDrive(ParamStr(0));//returns 'C:' or if UNC '\\servername\sharname'
   DriveAndPath := ExtractFilePath(ParamStr(0));
   ...
end;

ParamStr is used to obtain any parameters you pass to your program in an array. The zero (0) element contains the program itself, 1 contains the 1st parameter, 2 ...etc...

 

[MLNorton]

My problem is the Connection Syring that always points to the drive that the program was created on. I need to be able to point to a different drive when the program and data are on a different drive.

 

[majlumbo]

Hard to give you options without knowing more about your situation. Do you have control over the db installation or do your users install the db separate from your application?

 

[Griffyn]

You need to have a configuration setup regardless. This could be done via an .INI file that's kept with the program file (see TIniFile), or the registry (see TRegistry) or via a command-line parameter (see ParamStr, as indicated above by mailjumbo), or even as an option within the program itself via a TEdit or somesuch.

Read the configuration prior to setting up your connection string, and then build it using the configuration details.

 

[djjd47130]

Agreed perfectly with Griffyn, and in fact I have a personal rule that I never ever hard-code connection strings, file paths, or even web sites directly in the EXE (or otherwise in the code). Every application I build includes (most commonly) an INI configuration file. Adding on to the above list, you can also use XML, which is more common actually for web applications.

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