Question

Currently I have a web service, which loads up any plugins located within its /plugins folder. Now the problem is that each plugin has its own set of configuration data, currently hardcoded and isolated into a single class, but I want to move this out into a myplugin.config file.

Normally the web service loads up its own web.config file, but I am not sure if I can get the plugins to use their own ones. As if you imagine the main web service uses NHibernate and does CRUD stuff with some arbitrary data, but one of the plugins adds a caching layer using MongoDB and has its own connection string details. So the MVC web service shouldn’t really care about these settings, it should just be the MyPlugin which would need to read them.

Is there any way to do this? As I just want to get away from having the connection string ingrained within the code.

Answer 1

I have sorted this problem now, I was able to do it without much work really once I found out how config files could be loaded in.

I made sure my config file was named after the assembly loaded via MEF, so if my assembly was:

• some-custom-plugin.dll

You would make a config file named:

• some-custom-plugin.dll.config

then you would call:

var config = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration("some-custom-plugin.dll");
var someValue = config.AppSettings["some-app-setting"];

So hope this helps someone as it took me a while to find this simple thing out.