📓 Connecting a Database to an ASP.NET Core App with MySqlConnector
In the last lesson, we created a database for our To Do List using MySQL Workbench. In this lesson, we'll connect the database to our application using a tool called MySqlConnector. Once connected, we'll be able to interact with our database and its tables as C# objects in our application.
First, let's think about how we'll refactor our To Do List app to use a database.
To Do List Database Refactor Plan​
The rest of the weekend homework will focus on building methods to access and update our database from scratch. This process is labor-intensive and involves a lot of tedious boilerplate code. Later in this section, we'll learn to use a framework called Entity Framework Core that manages our database connection and provides easy-to-use methods to access and update our database. The goal of building database methods from scratch now is to to get an understanding of what is really going on under the hood before we start using Entity Framework Core.
You are welcome to code along with these lessons, or simply to read through them. At the end of this walkthrough, we'll provide an example repo with the finished project. If you'd like to get a sense of the finished project in advance, go ahead and take a look at the following repo:
Example GitHub Repo for To Do List with MySqlConnector
Project Structure & Configuration​
Let's start refactoring our To Do List app to use a MySQL database. After following along with last section's lessons, our To Do List's file and folder structure should look like this:
ToDoList.Solution
├── ToDoList
│  ├── Controllers
│  │  ├── CategoriesController.cs
│  │  ├── HomeController.cs
│  │  └── ItemsController.cs
│  ├── Models
│  │  ├── Category.cs
│  │  └── Item.cs
│  ├── Program.cs
│ ├── Properties
│ │ └── launchSettings.json
│  ├── ToDoList.csproj
│  └── Views
│  ├── Categories
│  │  ├── Index.cshtml
│  │  ├── New.cshtml
│  │  └── Show.cshtml
│  ├── Home
│  │  └── Index.cshtml
│  └── Items
│  ├── New.cshtml
│  └── Show.cshtml
└── ToDoList.Tests
├── ModelTests
│  ├── CategoryTests.cs
│  └── ItemTests.cs
└── ToDoList.Tests.csproj
Your project directory may be slightly different if you added a Shared directory with a _Layout.cshtml file or if you included static assets in a wwwroot directory (with related subdirectories).
MySqlConnector Installation & Configuration​
We'll begin by walking through how to set up a MySQL database connection in a project using MySqlConnector. Let's update our .csproj file to include MySqlConnector.
Installing the MySqlConnector Package​
We can use the following command in the production directory of our project (ToDoList.Solution/ToDoList) to add this package:
$ dotnet add package MySqlConnector -v 2.2.0
This command should also automatically restore the packages in our application, but if you encounter any errors, run the following command to manually restore packages:
$ dotnet restore
Creating a Database Connection String​
When we connect to our database, we must manually open a connection by creating a new instance of the MySqlConnection class from the MySqlConnector package. We'll learn exactly how to do this in upcoming lessons. What's important to know right now is that the MySqlConnection constructor expects a database connection string that contains the access details of our database: its name, the database user and password, and the database server and port. For our To Do List app, this is what our connection string will look like:
"server=localhost;port=3306;uid=root;pwd=epicodus;database=to_do_list_with_mysqlconnector;"
The connection string includes five distinct parts:
serveridentifies our database's server. We listlocalhostbecause our application is running on a server local to our machine, not online.uididentifies our database's user. In the LearnHowToProgram.com example lessons, we'll always assume the user is 'root'.pwdprovides the password for the given user. You should input your own password that you set up as the value to this field. In the LearnHowToProgram.com example lessons, we'll always assume the password is 'epicodus'.portidentifies the port MySQL is running on. The default port number for a MySQL server is 3306.databaseis the database name. In our case, this is theto_do_list_with_mysqlconnectordatabase we created a few lessons ago.
Protecting the Database Connection String with appsettings.json​
Notably, the connection string contains sensitive data (password and username) that we don't want exposed on the internet. So what can we do to hide this information, but still use it in our project? ASP.NET Core provides built-in support for managing application configurations through a file called appsettings.json. As the name suggests this file is written in JSON and it contains application settings, like database connection strings.
In order to protect the data in appsettings.json, we must add it to our .gitignore so that it never gets saved to our remote repository. Let's do that first, before we create appsettings.json.
obj
bin
appsettings.json
Make sure to commit the changes you made to your .gitignore before moving on.
Next, let's create appsettings.json. Within the production directory of our project (ToDoList.Solution/ToDoList), create appsettings.json and add the following code to it:
{
"ConnectionStrings": {
"DefaultConnection": "Server=localhost;Port=3306;database=to_do_list_with_mysqlconnector;uid=[YOUR-USERNAME-HERE];pwd=[YOUR-PASSWORD-HERE];"
}
}
Make sure to update the connection string with the values that you set for your username and password. As noted earlier, we'll always assume the user is 'root' and the password is epicodus.
Also note that since our appsettings.json has been put in our .gitignore, users will not have access to it when cloning our project. This means that you will need to add specific instructions in your README that tells the user where to create the file, and what code to include in it. We recommend using the above formatting and directing users to replace [YOUR-USERNAME-HERE] and [YOUR-PASSWORD-HERE] with the user's own user and password values.
Accessing appsettings.json through builder.Configuration in Program.cs​
ASP.NET Core automatically loads appsettings.json as our application host's official configuration file. This happens implicitly when we create our WebApplicationBuilder in Program.cs. Remember the following line of code?
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using ToDoList.Models;
namespace ToDoList
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
WebApplicationBuilder builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
...
}
}
}
Well, when we create the builder instance, our configurations in appsettings.json automatically get loaded and added to our web app host as a property of the builder instance: builder.Configuration. Here's how we'll access our database connection string in Program.cs:
builder.Configuration["ConnectionStrings:DefaultConnection"];
The big implication here is that we can't access the appsettings.json data from just anywhere in our app. If we want to access data in appsettings.json, we need to do it through builder.Configuration in Program.cs when we create our web app host. So, our next two steps are to create a class with a property that holds the database connection string that we can use throughout our application, and then update Program.cs to set the value of that property.
Making the Connection String Available throughout the App​
Let's first create a class to store the database connection string. Create a new file called DatabaseConfig.cs and add it to the ToDoList/Models directory:
namespace ToDoList.Models
{
public static class DBConfiguration
{
public static string ConnectionString { get; set; }
}
}
Note that we can name the file name, class name, and property whatever we like so long as we follow the general convention of descriptive naming.
Also notice that the class and property are both static, meaning that the class can't have an instance, and the property also cannot be called on an instance. When we want to get or set ConnectionString, we'll do so by accessing DBConfiguration.ConnectionString.
Next let's update Program.cs to set the value of the ConnectionString property to the database connection string within appsettings.json. We'll do this by adding one new line of code to Program.cs:
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using ToDoList.Models;
namespace ToDoList
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
WebApplicationBuilder builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
builder.Services.AddControllersWithViews();
// new line!
DBConfiguration.ConnectionString = builder.Configuration["ConnectionStrings:DefaultConnection"];
WebApplication app = builder.Build();
...
app.Run();
}
}
}
We can now use our database connection string via DBConfiguration.ConnectionString anywhere in our application. What's more, we've protected our database connection string by adding it to appsettings.json which we've told Git to ignore. We haven't yet learned how to open a database connection with the connection string, but that's exactly what we'll do in the next lesson.
Going forward, don't forget to include setup instructions in your README for an appsettings.json with a database connection string.