nosuchblogger

I had this strange Elmah problem that was very annoying but was documented, however it wasn't obvious - to me anyway!

The problem

First off, let me describe the problem. I had the following setup in web.config:

<connectionStrings>
  <add name="elmah.db" connectionString="data source=~/App_Data/elmah.db" />
</connectionStrings>

<elmah>
  <security allowRemoteAccess="1" />
  <errorLog type="Elmah.SQLiteErrorLog, Elmah" connectionStringName="elmah.db" />
</elmah>

<add verb="POST,GET,HEAD" path="elmah.axd" type="Elmah.ErrorLogPageFactory, Elmah" />

All worked perfectly locally, however on uploading to my hosting provider, navigating to elmah.axd, all I got was a page that can only be described as garbage: just a load of control characters and such...

Also, the elmah.db file wasn't getting created, so something weird was going on.

Red Herring

I'd had some problems when I upgraded from a 32 to 64 bit OS, so I spent some time going round in circles trying different dll's - all without success.

Finally, after some searching and RTFM-ing, I realised the problem is that my hosting provider enforces partial trust, however, SQLite requires full trust.

So, essentially, there is no solution - you simply can't use Elmah with SQLite in this scenario. However, it is simple to switch to an alternative error log implementation.

I was already using SQLServer so I simply added the necessary tables using the script provided, and then changed the web.config as follows:

<elmah>
  <errorLog type="Elmah.SqlErrorLog, Elmah" connectionStringName="elmah.sql.db" />
</elmah>

With that simple change, Elmah is now working as expected. Simple when you know the answer!