I still think we are missing each other. When I'm building a site, I want my connection string to point to the remote server by IP address with the login credentials (I do a foreign connection to the database). When I upload the files to take them live, I want the connection to point to the server with 'localhost', not the IP address. It's convenient to have this logic built in to the connection file. So, in the DataBridge dynamic connection definition you could specify both connections and it would toggle between the local and the remote based on whether $foundConnection was true or false.
That's the logic I want to add to the MySQLi connection file.