Standard configuration for net 20

2007, Jun 14 3 mins read

I’m trying to develop a little framework to include in future projects, actually I had classes and project spread around partition D F and G, and I realized that I’m not really a tidy person :D. At this moment I only had written some classes to handle access to db with direct Sql, and I really liked used Anonymous delegate as did ayende in one of his post. At a certain point I faced the problem to decide where to save the setting of the project, for example the main connectionString. I must admit that I really love the XML configuration of.Net, so instead of using plain application setting I plan to use a custom configuration. I started with a simple class to handle global section of the configuration.

publicclassNablaHelpersConfiguration : ConfigurationSection {

[ConfigurationProperty(“DataAccessConfiguration”, IsRequired = true)]
publicDataAccessConfiguration DataAccess {
get {
return (DataAccessConfiguration)this[“DataAccessConfiguration”];
}
}
}

This is the base class for the configuration, and right now it contains only a property that is an instance of the class that handle the configuration of the DataAccess part of the library. As you can see with ConfigurationPropertyattribute I specify that my configuration has an element called DataAccessConfiguration of type DataAccessConfiguration, the class inherits from ConfigurationSection because it is my config section for the library. Now it’s the turn of DataAccessConfigurationClass

publicclassDataAccessConfiguration : ConfigurationElement {

[ConfigurationProperty(“MainConnectionString”)]
publicConnectionStringSettings ConnectionString {
get { return (ConnectionStringSettings)this[“MainConnectionString”]; }
set { this[“MainConnectionString”] = value; }
}
}

This class inherits from ConfigurationElement and has a simple property marked with ConfigurationPropertyAttribute that states that my data access layer need an element called MainConnectionStringof type ConnectionStringSettings, the standard class to store connection strings in.net. With these two classes I can simply create this app.config file.

<!–Configuration for the nablahelper assembly–>
<NablaHelpers>
<DataAccessConfiguration>
<MainConnectionString
name=“MainConnectionString“
connectionString=“Database=Northwind;Server=localhost\SQL2000;… “
providerName=“System.Data.SqlClient“/>
</DataAccessConfiguration>
</NablaHelpers>

To use my custom configuration classes I firt specify in configSection the type of the configuration class (NablaHelpersConfiguration) as well as the node name that contains data for the configuration, then I create the section and name it “NablaHelpers”, and inside I store all my configuration. I must admit that I really love XML configuration files.
To retrieve current configuration in the code you can simply ask to the System.Configuration class.

NablaHelpersConfigurationIConfigurationHandler.CurrentConfiguration {
get {
return (NablaHelpersConfiguration) System.Configuration
.ConfigurationManager.GetSection(“NablaHelpers”);
}
}

I include this property in an helper class to avoid to call System.Configuration each time, as you can see an instance of the configuration class can be obtained simply calling System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.GetSection() specifying the name of the section to retrieve. With custom configuration classes you can include all your configuration in a single customized section of your config file.

Alk.

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Standard configuration for net 20