Lots of people have been having problems with their connections strings not working and their maps hanging on "Fetching...".

There are many posts in this forum related to this issue, some of which don't mention the connection string specifically but I think the same solution should fix your problems and allow you to access your external data. I'm not part of the project team, nor was I suffering from the problem as my data is local (at the moment), but it was bugging me so I had a dig around today and think I've found the cause.

The problem seems to be caused by a bug (i'm going to enter a bug for this to see if I've analysed it properly) in the Admin code for the map control panel. If you are a power user (which you must be to use a Custom Query) then the code makes the assumption that what you are entering into the Connection String field is the name of a setting in the web.config file that contains your connection string. Entering an actual connection string will simply cause the code to go looking for an entry in the Web.Config file that it can't possibly find, hence the map points never being retrieved let alone rendered.

THE SOLUTION

I have tested this procedure and it worked for me:

• Edit your web.config file and find the section called <appSettings>. You'll find a legacy connection string to your DNN database in this section already.
• Add a new Key Name and set its value to be your connection string
• In the Map Settings panel, make sure that the Connection String is exactly the same as the new Key Name that you just created

Example web.config entry:

    <add key="MapTest" value="Server=<servername>;Database=<databasename>;uid=<userid>;pwd=<password>;" />
 

That's it! You may need to reload your site now to ensure that the web.config file is re-parsed but making that change should hopefully resolve the problem for you.

I should point out that my map data is on my DNN database, so I created my MapTest connection to point at exactly the same database but I cannot see any reason why this now won't work for all of you on a remote database.

I'd appreciate it if someone can confirm that this has resolved their problems on this thread so that others know that the technique works!

Regards, Sean