Question

I have a class in a web application I am working on that holds client settings. For some background, I do not own this class, and changing it is not an option. We recently added some logic to store the settings in a database, and I was tasked with creating a page to edit them, fair enough.

Here is my issue; the settings are held in a static class, and are themselves static, read-only properties. For example

public static class Settings
{
 public static readonly setting1 = SettingmanagerClass.GetSetting("setting1");
 public static readonly setting2 = SettingmanagerClass.GetSetting("setting2");
 public static readonly setting3 = SettingmanagerClass.GetSetting("setting3");
}

Now, for example, through the page I wrote, we change the value for setting2 to “Happy Variable”; it saves to the DB just fine, but now I need it to be reflected in the web app as the new value. Since it is a static readonly property of a static class, it only ever gets called when the app first wires up and can’t be set manually.

Just to reiterate, I don’t own the original class, so “just make the properties writeable” is not (currently) a valid option. Normally I would just talk this over with my boss and he would make a judgement call and possibly allow me to modify the other class, but I am not in a position to make that call and he is out of the office for the week.

So basically; is there any way to re-initialize a static class once a web application has started running? I just need for it to reload all of its properties as if the app was just rebuilt and started up again.

Answer 1

If the above code is representative of the situation you’re in, you won’t be able to reinitialize the code unless you do something particularly hacky with reflection (this is not recommended by the way).

Edit: Oh wait – I didn’t realize this was a web app. You could programmatically bounce the application:

System.Web.HttpRuntime.UnloadAppDomain