Sometimes you may encounter an issue where you can’t open Shepherd’s Staff to point the software to the correct database due to a few reasons. This can be caused by the computer has lost connection to the Shared Drive that houses the church database and has defaulted back to the default database or that the database was accidentally switched to a database from a prior version of the software.
In cases like that what you can do is go into your C: Drive on your computer. Once in the C: Drive you will want to go to Users, Public, Public Documents, and then CPH Shepherds Staff 8 folder. Then in the CPH Shepherds Staff 8 folder you should see a file in there called Staff8 this is the INI file which is how Shepherd’s Staff knows which database to go to.
Finding your database can be difficult at times and if you are not comfortable with editing INI files, please feel free to reach out to support.
To get Shepherd’s Staff to point to the correct database you will want to open the Staff8 INI File which will open a window that looks like this:
To change where the database is being pointed to you will usually need to change either the DatabasePath or the DatabaseName though depending on the situation you may need to change both.
For example, if you are using Shepherd’s Staff on a single computer you would just need to change the DatabaseName to the name of your database and then click save. However, if your church has moved the database to a different folder than the default ShepherdsStaff folder you will need to change the DatabasePath as well from C:\ShepherdsStaff to the name of the new folder you had the database stored in.
If you are using Shepherd’s Staff on a network, you will need to change the DatabasePath to the drive letter of the Shared Drive that houses the database for example “DatabasePath= Z:\” and you would then change the DatabaseName to the database in the Shared Drive then click save.