seed method works in local machine but not appharbor

Question

My seed method works perfectly fine when running in my local machine, but when I push my code to appharbor the seed is not working.

This is my connection string:

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="FinalProjectContext" connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;User
Id=user;Password=pass;initial catalog=MyContextDB;" 
providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
</connectionStrings>

My seed method is inside the Configuration file for migrations:

public Configuration()
{
    AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = true;
    AutomaticMigrationDataLossAllowed = true;
}

protected override void Seed(MyContext context)
{
   //add data
}

And I'm calling my seed method from the context class, inside the OnModelCreating:

protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
    Database.SetInitializer(new MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion<MyContext, Configuration>());
}

EDIT

Answer 1

After a lot of debugging, searching, testing and reading, the problem wasn't really related to appharbor per say. The project is using a DBFactory for the context, and this where the problem was occurring. In my local machine EF was calling the Initializer every time I started the application so the Database would get seeded, but in order for this to work in app harbor I had to set the Initializer to false (explicitly) in the DBFactory constructor.

EDIT

The problem goes even further. Not sure how EF is tracking this but I think that if I run the code locally then the Database gets created locally and EF flags the migration as "executed", so when I move the code to Appharborit doesn't get seeded. Only way I've found to solve this is to delete the database locally and then push it to Appharbor.

Answer 2

The problem is probably that your connection-string isn't set by AppHarbor. I'm not entirely sure how to ensure that it does, but if you go to your configuration-page for the MSSQL-"addon" from here:

Then set's the "SQLSERVER_CONNECTION_STRING_ALIAS" to your connection-string-name (in your case "MyContext" here:

That should probably do the trick.

Answer 3

Your connectionstring name should be the same as the alias i.e. "FinalProjectContext"

<add name="FinalProjectContext" connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;UserId=user;Password=pass;initial catalog=MyContextDB;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />

Then appharbor will know to swap it out for the proper one :)