Question

I’m developing an Windows Runtime Component that wraps consuming an OAuth 2.0 service (it uses the WebAuthenticationBroker and securely stores the returned tokens) but the OAuth service can be hosted in one of several different locations. For example we have our own local development service, up to 5 different alpha/qa environments, a pre-prod environment and the live production environment. All these different environments respond to different URIs.

I want to be able to change the URI that my component is targeting so that people who consume my component can target any of these environments but I don’t particularly want to put the URI in the settings charm (if that’s even possible for a Runtime Component) because I don’t want final users to be able to configure it.

I’ve considered using #if Debug/Live/Preprod/QA1 etc and including the various URIs inline in the code but it doesn’t seem like a very practical solution. I don’t want to have that many different versions of my binary to choose from.
Is there a practical way of managing this?

One idea I’ve just had is to assume that the component is using the live server and use a setting in ApplicationData to override that. I’m not sure if the Runtime Component will share the same ApplicationData store as the application which is consuming it, I think it probably will but I’m just guessing.

Note, I’ve posted this question on the Win 8 developer forum at MSDN too.

Answer 1

I’ve created a method in my public interface SetConfiguration(Configuration c). If the developer consuming my component doesn’t provide a Configuration instance then the component will use my default values, otherwise they can provider their own overrides in the Configuration instance.