Question

I am seeing simple examples regarding custom configuration in .NET. My case is a bit more complex, with nested nodes.

I’d like to be able to read this from the configuration file:

 <environments>  <environment name='live' url='http://www.live.com'>   <server name='a' IP='192.168.1.10'></server>   <server name='b' IP='192.168.1.20'></server>   <server name='c' IP='192.168.1.30'></server>       </environment>  <environment name='dev' url='http://www.dev.com'>   <server name='a' IP='192.168.1.10'></server>   <server name='c' IP='192.168.1.30'></server> </environment>  <environment name='test' url='http://www.test.com'>   <server name='b' IP='192.168.1.20'></server>   <server name='d' IP='192.168.1.40'></server> </environment></environments>  

If anyone could provide some code for that, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can read this by implementing custom configuration classes inheriting from the ConfigurationElement class.

Here is an example of the ‘server’ element:

public class ServerElement: ConfigurationElement {     [ConfigurationProperty('name', IsRequired = true, IsKey = true)]     public string Name     {         get { return ((string)base['name']); }         set { base['name'] = value; }     }      ... } 

The environment element is actually a collection and could be implemented like this:

public class EnvironmentElement: ConfigurationElementCollection {     protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement(string elementName)     {         return new ServerElement(...);     } }