Take Control of Your Web.Config

After reading a Paul Sheriff article in CODE Magazine, I ended up creating a base WebConfig class to handle getting values out of my web.config. I’ve hated the ConfigurationManager.AppSettings since they deprecated it from ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings. So now I have my own GetAppSetting so I never have to worry about it again. 

My base class looks like this:

public class BaseWebConfig
{
protected static string GetAppSetting(string appSettingName)
{
    if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName] == null)
        throw new NullReferenceException(appSettingName 
            + " AppSettings value cannot be null or empty in the web.config.");

    return ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName];
}

protected static bool GetBoolAppSetting(string appSettingName)
{
    return Convert.ToBoolean(GetAppSetting(appSettingName));
}

protected static string[] GetStringArraySetting(string appSettingName)
{
    var values = GetAppSetting(appSettingName).Split(new[] { ',' });
    return values;
}

protected static int GetIntAppSetting(string appSettingName)
{
    int i;
    if (!int.TryParse(GetAppSetting(appSettingName), out i))
        throw new InvalidCastException(appSettingName 
            + " AppSettings value is an invalid integer.");

    return i;
}

protected static DateTime GetDateTimeAppSetting(string appSettingName)
{
    DateTime dt;
    if (!DateTime.TryParse(GetAppSetting(appSettingName), out dt))
        throw new InvalidCastException(appSettingName 
            + " AppSettings value is an invalid DateTime.");

    return dt;
}

protected static string GetConnectionString(string connectionStringName)
{
    if (ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[connectionStringName] == null)
        throw new NullReferenceException(connectionStringName 
            + " ConnectionStrings value cannot be null in the web.config.");

    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[connectionStringName].ConnectionString))
        throw new NullReferenceException(connectionStringName 
            + " ConnectionStrings value cannot be null or empty in the web.config.");

    return ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[connectionStringName].ConnectionString;
}
}

Here’s the breakdown:

• GetAppSetting – Gets a string value


• GetBoolAppSetting – Gets a bool value


• GetStringArraySetting – Gets a string[] value


• GetIntAppSetting – Gets an int value


• GetDateTimeAppSetting – Gets a DateTime value


• GetConnectionString – Gets a connection string value

Pretty simple stuff here…well I think it’s self-explanatory. Note they’re all protected so the inheriting class can access them, but nothing else. The reason I do this is because I never want a magic string passed in and risk getting a run-time error with a simple typo.

So with this base class, I inherit it in another WebConfig class in my actual project. Here’s an example of one:

public class WebConfig : BaseWebConfig
{
    public static string ReturnEmail
    {
        get { return GetAppSetting("ReturnEmail"); }
    }

    public static bool IsTestEnvironment
    {
        get { return GetBoolAppSetting("IsTestEnvironment"); }
    }

    public static DateTime ShutOffDate
    {
        get { return GetDateTimeAppSetting("ShutOffDate"); }
    }

    public static string DbConnectionString
    {
        get { return GetConnectionString("DbConnectionString"); }
    }
}

You can see above, I can reference my web.config all day long and never worry about mistyping something. If I need to rename something, I can easily do that as well. If you’re a reader of my blog, you know I’m a huge fan of being strongly-typed. I love for intellisense to help me out :)

I really like the simplicity of this method because it’s easy for beginner team members to use. That’s all I got…let me know if you have comments.

Thanks for reading!