Question

I have an app.config file that stores values in a few different sections. I have these snippets:

<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <sectionGroup name="someDataAccessLayer">
        <section name="databaseConnectionStrings" type="sometype" />
    </sectionGroup>
  </configSections>
  <someDataAccessLayer>
     <databaseConnectionStrings>
        <databaseConnectionString name="someSQL"           
             value="database=somedatabase;Integrated Security=False;User Id=sa;server=someserver;Password=somepassword/>
     </databaseConnectionStrings>
  </someDataAccessLayer>

How do I read the connection string in the codebehind? Specifically the value which is

database=somedatabase;Integrated Security=False;User Id=sa;server=someserver;Password=somepassword

Thanks for your help! Please let me know if the question is still unclear.

Answer 1

Your configuration section will be associated with some .NET class to handle it:

  <configSections>
    <sectionGroup name="someDataAccessLayer">
       <section name="databaseConnectionStrings" type="sometype" />
    </sectionGroup>
  </configSections>

So to read the settings from the <localeSettings> section, you need to use the ConfigurationManager (add a reference to System.Configuration to your project) to get those settings into an instance of that class:

sometype cs = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("someDataAccessLayer/databaseConnectionStrings") as     sometype;

Now you have an object of type sometype that contains all the settings in that config section. One of those properties will be a list of database connection strings, which you can now enumerate and find the appropriate one and read it’s .Value property.