I'm not the person to decide this, but from my point of view this will be very hard to change. EPiServerDB is not used in our code, but many tools (such as powershell, settings,...) use it to determine a connectionString is for CMS or not.

I can see a possible solution as to add a setting in web.config to specify the connectionString name for CMS, but it will make it much more complicated to work with that.

No, I'm not saying we're doing this or not doing this. Just for your information :)

/Q

I'm interested in the background of why you want to change it? :)

Thanks for the info Quan.

Johan. I am trying out a couple of little more advanced setups for multiple sites in the same solution. In one try I use virtual directory and doing that it crashed because the EPiServerDB-connectionstring was already defined in the parent web.config. I solved it by adding clear first in the connectionstrings node.

I know this is a very edge case and I do not think it is a very important feature, more a nice to have :)

OK! I can see that virtual dir setup will have some other issues as well and also might be coming back a bit. For example Google is doing it with google.com/analytics/ and google.com/tagmanager/ as opposed to using sub domains for mail and maps etc.

True Johan.
It might be that I will not go that way, still in the process on testing different solutions. One thing with using virtual directories and in that way independent sites is that it will be extra licence cost, because you pay per site, and now you have two sites....

My use case is the following:

Specify connection string at IIS level (not the website level, so it's inherited by all IIS websites) - name would be Client1_EPiServerDB. Then at website level the connection strings node in web.config is empty because it inherits from parent which is good because you can keep all the different developer connection strings out of source control and each developer can set their own slightly different connection string.

Because of the hardcoded connection string name, the above method is only available if the developers machine has a single episerver website on it (which they never do).