If you're an Active Server Page (ASP) developer working with a commercial Internet service provider (ISP), you often don't know the physical path of the files you upload. If your ISP doesn't define a data source name (DSN) for you or is slow to do so, you must find another way to create the connections to your database files. One alternative is to create a DSN-less connection to a database file, but you can only define such a connection if you know the physical path of the database file on the ISP's server.

This article describes how you can obtain the physical path of a file on a server by using the MapPath method of the ASP server object. Here are the topics covered:

Understanding physical and virtual paths

Finding a file's physical path with the virtual path

Using a virtual path to connect to a database

Charles Nadeau Charles Nadeau is a lead technical writer on the Dreamweaver documentation team. 14 May 2001 MapPath, DSN-less connection, database connection, Active Server Page, ASP, ISP, physical path, virtual path, remote site, remote server, server object, connection string, DBQ 9892