Loading Settings From web.config

It's always a good idea to be as consistent as possible when you're writing code. So when you're using settings from a configuration file it's a good idea to avoid sprinkling ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MySetting"] around the codebase, especially if you've making multiple calls to it.

A great way to provide consistency and to remove this duplication is to create a settings class either one static global one or multiple instance classes which I'll then manage with dependency injection. Then I load all the settings from configuration into that class on start up.

I've also written a little library that makes use of reflection to make this even easier.

Once my settings are in my config file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
	<appSettings>
		<add key="Domain" value="example.com" />
		<add key="PagingSize" value="30" />
		<add key="Invalid.C#.Identifier" value="test" />
	</appSettings>
</configuration>

I make a static or instance class depending on my needs. For simple applications with only a few settings one static class is fine.

private static class Settings
{
	public string Domain { get; set; }

	public int PagingSize { get; set; }

	[Named("Invalid.C#.Identifier")]
	public string ICID { get; set; }

}

Then using my library call either Inflate.Static or Inflate.Instance and the cool thing is I can use any key value source.

using Fire.Configuration;

Inflate.Static( typeof(Settings), x => ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[x] );


var settings = new SpecificSettings();

Inflate.Instance( settings, x => ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[x] );

All the code for this is in bitbucket at https://bitbucket.org/Lavinski/fire

There is even a nuget package https://nuget.org/packages/Fire/

Install-Package Fire

Loading Settings From web.config

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