Question

I have an asp.net web app. I want to separate out a particular section alone, say for instance, appsettings and have it in a separate config file. How do I manage 2 config files for asp.net app?
As per the example, the appsettings alone comes during deployment. Either I can add this section into web.config and have 1 config file or have the appsettings section as a separate file. Any clean way to do it?

Answer 1

Yes, you can extract sections out of web.config. For example, for connection strings, lets say you have

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="MyEntities" connectionString="my connection string" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />
  </connectionStrings>
</configuration>

You could separate Connection string section into separate file. So your web.config becomes

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionString.Config" />
</configuration>

And ConnectionString.Config file will have

<connectionStrings>
  <add name="MyEntities" connectionString="my connection string" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />
</connectionStrings>