Question

I am writing a small command-line tool for my own daily tasks, and having problems reading from a XML file I have used for configuration. As per the examples, I use this code to load the XML file for Linq-to-XML.

    XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("SearchSources.xml");

What I’m having problems with is when I “deploy” my app and XML to c:\windows\system32 for easy access, it won’t work when I try to launch the file from the RUN prompt (e.g. run => TOOL -commands) because it’s looking for the XML relative to wherever I launch the application.

I could obviously change the path to be the full path, e.g. c:\windows\system32\SearchSources.xml in the code, but that would prevent me from running it via F5 in Visual Studio.

EDIT: I am attempting to do this in code, rather than modifying configuration files when I deploy the app to other locations.

Answer 1

Use:

String filePath = System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(
    System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location
) + @"\SearchSources.xml";

That will create a path to the file based on the directory of the executable.

Or using Path.Combine, as suggested:

String filePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(
    System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(
         System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location
    ),
    "SearchSources.xml"
);