How to add a xml in web.config?

Question

I have some complex data which is used for application configuration in xml format. I want to keep this xml string in web.config. Is it possible to add a big xml string in web.config and get it in code everywhere?

Sounds like you want to use a `Settings` file? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730869(v=vs.80).aspx — Yuck, Mar 12 '12 at 12:20
nopes I want to have this xml string in web.config only.not in any other settings file or resource file this is my clients requirement. — gmtek, Mar 12 '12 at 12:26
The `Settings` values are stored in web.config. The `Settings.settings` file is used by the designer. — jrummell, Mar 12 '12 at 12:28
It's your job to convince your client that **they're doing it wrong**. Using `web.config` as a place to dump other XML simply because it's the same type is a poor excuse. There's already infrastructure for working with data in a `Settings` file in a strongly-typed manner. See jrummell's comment. — Yuck, Mar 12 '12 at 12:29

Joe · Answer 1 · 2017-03-09T10:39:45.030

17

If you don't want to write a configuration section handler, you could just put your XML in a custom configuration section that is mapped to IgnoreSectionHandler:

<configuration>
    <configSections>
      <section 
          name="myCustomElement" 
          type="System.Configuration.IgnoreSectionHandler" 
          allowLocation="false" />
    </configSections>
    ...
    <myCustomElement>
        ... complex XML ...
    </myCustomElement>
    ...
</configuration>

You can then read it using any XML API, e.g. XmlDocument, XDocument, XmlReader classes. E.g.:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ConfigurationFile);
XmlElement node = doc.SelectSingleNode("/configuration/myCustomElement") as XmlElement;
... etc ...

edited Mar 09 '17 at 10:39

answered Mar 12 '12 at 13:35

Joe

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Probably this is what I looking for. – gmtek Mar 13 '12 at 04:28
Will u plz tell how can I read the "...complex xml..." as a string in my code? – gmtek Mar 13 '12 at 04:29
@Idorado, I added an example of reading the custom element using the XmlDocument class. – Joe Mar 13 '12 at 08:20
Thank you Joe This is exactly what i was searching. – gmtek Mar 13 '12 at 09:18
@Gulshan: It's nice to reward this user if his answer solved your issue by [marking the answer as accepted](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5234/how-does-accepting-an-answer-work). – JohnDoDo Dec 07 '12 at 17:11
2

describer must be put in And in – Boogier Jun 03 '14 at 06:59
@Joe, Thanks! Nice and clean way to do it. – Jan 01 '15 at 10:35
1

@Boogier, No need to put in applicationSettings, because, you can define your own Custom Element in the config file this way. – Jan 01 '15 at 10:37

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 12 '12 at 12:24

6

There are several ways of achieving what you want (an XML fragment that is globally and statically accessible to your application code):

The web.config is already an XML file. You can write a custom configuration section (as described here) in order to fetch the data from your custom XML.
You can encode the XML data (all < to <, > to &gt, & to &, " to &quote;)
You can put the XML data in a <![CDATA[]]> section
Don't use web.config for this, but a Settings file as @Yuck commented

That last option is the best one, in terms of ease of development and usage.

answered Mar 12 '12 at 12:24

Oded

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Is it possible to add an array of objects in settings file? – gmtek Mar 12 '12 at 12:39
Not an array, as far as I am aware, but you _can_ add collections (there is a built in StringCollection, for example). – Oded Mar 12 '12 at 13:11

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 12 '12 at 12:36

The configuration sections in web.config support long strings, but the string has to be a single line of text so they can fit into an attribute:

 <add name="" value="... some very long text can go in here..." />

The string also can't contain quotes or line breaks or other XML markup characters. The data is basically XML and it has to be appropriately encoded.

For example, if you have XML like this:

 <root>
   <value>10</value>
 </root>

it would have to be stored in a configuration value like this:

<add key="Value" value="&lt;root&gt;&#xD;&#xA;  &lt;value&gt;10&lt;/value&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;/root&gt;" />

Which kind of defeats the purpose of a configuration element.

You might be better off storing the configuration value in a separate file on the file system and read it from there into a string or XmlDocument etc.

How to add a xml in web.config?

3 Answers3

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