Error: Data source name not found and no default driver specified

Edited text of question

I am not sure about your particular set-up for your ASP pages so I hope my comments are relevant.

"Data source name not found and no default driver specified"

this sounds like you are trying to open a connection to the database but IIS does not know / cannot find the data source name to use to open the database with.

This line of code here
formpubsFileDSN.Open Session("formpubsFileDSN_ConnectionString")
means use the given Connection Object (in your case formpubsFileDSN) and open a connection to the database indicated by the data source name which follows.
You are using a Session variable. Why you want to do that I don't know. A different Session object is kept for every user that visits your ASP pages - so assuming it's always the same database you want to access you are going to need to set that session variable to be equal to the name of the database as you set it up using the ODBC Data Source Administrator.

(I hope that I'm not telling you stuff you already know but
 this is the first thing I thought of after reading your problem  
 description.)

I suggest you modify the aforementioned line of code by removing the reference to the Session Object variable (it is just one more layer of complexity to muck stuff up.) After you get the ASP page working to your satisfaction you can come back and re-insert the reference to the Session Object (assuming that's how you want to do it.)

Anyways, I suggest you do something like this

    formpubsFileDSN.Open "fluffy"

(this will work assuming you named your database 'fluffy'
 in the ODBC Administrator.)

If you have already taken care to specify the name of your database by setting a value for ("formpubsFileDSN_ConnectionString")
then Oops, sorry. I guess I did not understand your question.

By the way, all my comments reference the IIS ASP ADO
Connection Object Methods and Properties,
specifically
connection.Open ConnectionString, User, Password

Visual Interdev produces almost unreadable "wizard code".

If you post your global.asa, i can try and make better readble (and debuggable) code.

Anyway, it seems that or that your global.asa is not ok, or (most likely) you don't have the ODBC connection created. At least that is what the error message says.

What is the value of
- Session("formpubsFileDSN_ConnectionString")
- Session("formpubsFileDSN_RuntimeUserName")
- Session("formpubsFileDSN_RuntimePassword")

You can display them by

Response.write Session("formpubsFileDSN_ConnectionString") & "<br>"

2718

Thanks for your help.  I was able to resolve the problem by using Visual InterDev 1.0's "Data Form Wizard" to create an connection as an example.  You are right, the session variables are not needed.   However, I have one quick question to ask about the setting the Connection_String by using relative pathnames rather than direct pathnames.

Since I created the connection on my local server, I could set the ConnectionString as:

"DBQ=C:\InetPub\wwwroot\usbccae2\data\database\formpubs.mdb;DefaultDir=C:\InetPub\wwwroot\usbccae2\data\database;Driver={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}"

However, I'd like to use relate pathname to the database file on the remote server and have it look something like the following:

"DBQ=..\data\database\formpubs.mdb;DefaultDir=..\data\database;Driver={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}"

But I get the following message appears when I load the ASP with the ralative pathnames:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access 97 Driver] '(unknown)' isn't a valid path. Make sure that the path name is spelled correctly and that you are connected to the server on which the file resides.

I figure that by using ralative pathnames, the database is more portable and I don't have to know the direct pathnames to the database directories on the remote servers.

Please suggest the proper method to use for connecting the the database using relative pathnames...even if you don't know,  submit your reply as a "proposed answer" and I will allocate the points to you for helping me with my previous question.

The easiest thing is to make an ODBC connection to the database and use that to connect to the database. Then the only thing you need to do when moving the site to another server, is to create an ODBC connection on the new server.

To create a connection to an ODBC Access database, you only need 2 lines:

Set Conn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
Conn.Open "DSN=YourODBCName"

i think you the access database needs to be located on the web server. Its a bug..

sybe

I am hoping to create a DSNless connnection.  The reason is because I can only access the virtual directory of my web site on the server and also I don't want to have to ask the systems admin to add create the ODBC connection for me each time.  What I wanted to do was to create an UNC pathname as a connection to my database.  That way I could transport the database anywhere and I would only need to make some minimal changes.  

I hope I didn't go off track from what you were saying.  thanks for the ideas.