Question

I have a piece of data, a simple string containing the server name that the SharePoint solution is deployed to, that I retrieve from a configuration store in a helper method in a common DLL used throughout my solution. This helper method is used throughout my custom pages and web parts, to build a number of URLs, etc.

I would like to persist this string, and prevent it being repeatedly retrieved from the configuration store. My Sharepoint installation is currently on a single server, but will be migrated to a SharePoint server farm in the near future, so simply determining the server name of the current request, etc isn’t an option. I have looked at caching as described in the best practices for SharePoint, but unless I use a coherent cache like NCache or Velocity/AppFrabric, I will again have issues when the move to server farm occurs. Given that this is a single string, adding a full caching solution such as Velocity seems like overkill.

Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to persist this data? Am I missing something obvious here?

Thanks, MagicAndi

Answer 1

You could:

• Store the string in web.config. You can programatically change the web.config on all the farm’s webservers using a SPWebConfigModification
• Store the string in a SharePoint list and read from it. I usually use this solution because I have more to store than a single string. The list is ‘available’ on all web servers and I cache its values in an ASP.NET cache object. Someone made this concept into a solution you can download and install: SPConfigStore