SQL Server Compact Code Snippet of the Week #7 : get the full path to a database file

A SQL Server Compact connection string allows you to specify the database name in various ways:

Data Source=c:\data\mydb.sdf

Data Source=mydb.sdf

Data Source=|DataDirectory|\mydb.sdf

But sometimes you need the full path to the database file based on a user defined connection string. This week’s code snippet allows you to do exactly that, and it is a little bit quirky, as it works around a bug in SQL Server Compact 4.0 SP1, that causes use of |DataDirectory| to not be resolved correctly using only the SqlCeConnectionStringBuilder.

 public string PathFromConnectionString(string connectionString)
 {
      SqlCeConnectionStringBuilder sb = new SqlCeConnectionStringBuilder(GetFullConnectionString(connectionString));
      return sb.DataSource;
 }

 public string GetFullConnectionString(string connectionString)
 {
     using (SqlCeReplication repl = new SqlCeReplication())
     {
         repl.SubscriberConnectionString = connectionString;
         return repl.SubscriberConnectionString;
     }
 }

Notice that the code above only works with version 4.0, not 3.5