Brothers In Code

A lot of these posts are merely for my own quick reference.  The upside of that is that you'll get a taste for the way I actually do something rather than just a rehash of a reference page.

For simpler projects I just create a class with some static properties that just pull from AppConfig variables.  At least from there I have intellisense to help me remember all of my configuration variables.  But the appSettings section app.config or web.config can get messy pretty fast so creating a custom section isn't that much work to clean it up.

First I'll create a ConfigurationSections folder (which creates an automatic namespace) and an AppConfig class:

The GeneralConfigurationSectionClass looks like this:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Configuration;

namespace MyCust.MyProj.ConfigurationSections
{
  public class GeneralConfigurationSection : ConfigurationSection
  {
    [ConfigurationProperty("TestKey")]
    public String TestKey
    {
      get { return (String)this["TestKey"]; }
      set { this["TestKey"] = value; }
    }
    [ConfigurationProperty("ConnectionString")]
    public String ConnectionString
    {
      get { return (String)this["ConnectionString"]; }
      set { this["ConnectionString"] = value; }
    }
  }
}

Then I'll create a property that pulls the config data and returns this class in the AppConfig.cs

  public class AppConfig
  {
    public static GeneralConfigurationSection General
    {
      get
      {
        return (GeneralConfigurationSection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("MyCust.MyProj/General");
      }
    }

  }

And last add the new section to the app/web.config.  First add the section group:

<configSections>
  <sectionGroup name="MyCust.MyProj.WebServices">
    <section name="General" type="MyCust.MyProj.WebServices.ConfigurationSections.GeneralConfigurationSection, MyCust.MyProj.WebServices" allowLocation="true" allowDefinition="Everywhere"/>
  </sectionGroup>
</configSections>

And then add the section itself into the configuration element:

<MyCust.MyProj.WebServices>
  <General
    TestKey="32AAAC4-8DB2-4059-852A-73BBBBBB9698"
    ConnectionString="Data Source=SqlServer;User Id=sa_app;Password=pwd;"
  />
</MyCust.MyProj.WebServices>

Usage is then a nice and clean line:

AppConfig.General.ConnectionString

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