Question

I need to know where and how application settings (connections string) could be stored so that they can be changed at run time and saved.

I know in VS you can configure settings under Project>Properties and these get stored in the appname.exe.config file under apps install directory.But the “application scope” ones are not read/write at run time and if you change the ones under user scope a copy of the config file is created under users directory and wont be accessed by other users of the application.

I need to have a way so that the user can configure connection string, stored in a common config file, as per their needs from within the app and then have all other users(on that machine) can use that too. how can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Simplest, fastest solution is to create a configuration file in a shared location where normal users have rights to read/write.

Create a class with public properties for your configuration data, then serialize it to xml in this shared location.

public class Configuration
{
  // config filename
  private static _name = Path.Combine(
      System.Environment.GetFolderPath(
         Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonApplicationData),
      @"MyApp\MyConfig.xml");

  // the connection string
  public string ConnectionString {get;set;}

  // load the configuration from disk
  public static Configuration Load()
  {
    using (var f = File.OpenRead(name))
    {
      var x = new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(typeof(Configuration));
      return x.Deserialize(f) as Configuration;
    }
  }

  // save the configuration to disk
  public static Save(Configuration config)
  {
    using (var f = File.OpenWrite(name))
    {
      var x = new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(typeof(Configuration));
      x.Serialize(f, config);
    }
  }
}