Question

I have two questions:

1) I have a few global variables for my website declared in my global.asax file. They are simple, small key/value pairs and there are only a few of them. Is this a good practice for values that are small and need to be accessed by almost every page on my website? Storing them in the database and requiring a db lookup seems as thought it would waste resources for values that don’t change rapidly.

2) If one of the values changes once per week, is it possible to allow a user to edit the global variable with a form or some other means?

Example:

<script runat="server">

  Overloads Sub Application_Start(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)

      Application("default_scoring_id") = 3
      Application("week_current") = 3

  End Sub

</script>

In the above example, the system needs to know which week (out of 15 of them) that the current date is within. So, once every Monday morning, the “week_current” value needs to change.

I can easily do this, but is there a way to give a user access to changing this value without touching the code?

Answer 1

The typical practice is to put these into the web.config, which can be edited. These <appSettings> values will then be available on every page, yet the file can be edited.