Question

Im having problems accessing a proprties collection attribute “name” for my pages element. Pages has a collection of page field that have attributes Could someone have a look at my code and show me how have a collection of pages with a name attribute on each one and access its value. At the moment my code return nothing but the page loads without any errors so I don’t know whats going on and how to get the attribute field.

<configSections>
  <sectionGroup name="site" type="MyProject.Configuration.Site">
    <section name="pages" type="MyProject.Configuration.Pages"/>      
  </sectionGroup>  
</configSections>


<site>
  <pages>
    <page name="test">        
    </page>
  </pages>    
</site>

Classes:

public class Site : ConfigurationSection
{
    [ConfigurationProperty("pages")]
    [ConfigurationCollection(typeof(PageCollection), AddItemName="page")]
    public PageCollection Pages
    {
        get
        {
            return base["pages"] as PageCollection;
        }
    }
}

public class PageCollection : ConfigurationElementCollection
{

    public PageCollection()
    {
        PageElement element = (PageElement)CreateNewElement();
        BaseAdd(element); // doesn't work here does if i remove it
    }

    protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement()
    {
        return new PageElement();
    }

    protected override object GetElementKey(ConfigurationElement element)
    {
        return ((PageElement)element).Name;
    }

    public PageElement this[int index]
    {
        get
        {
            return (PageElement)BaseGet(index);
        }
        set
        {
            if (BaseGet(index) != null)
            {
                BaseRemoveAt(index);
            }
            BaseAdd(index, value);
        }
    }

}

public class PageElement : ConfigurationElement
{
    public PageElement() { }

    [ConfigurationProperty("name", IsKey=true, IsRequired=true)]
    public string Name
    {
        get
        {
            return (string)base["name"];
        }
        set
        {
            base["name"] = value;
        }
    }
}

Code to access my attribute:

Pages pageSettings = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("site/pages") as Pages;
lblPage.Text = pageSettings.Page[0].Name;

Answer 1

The issue is that your section element should be site, not pages:

public class Site: ConfigurationSection
{
    [ConfigurationProperty("pages")]
    public PageCollection Page
    {
        get
        {
            return base["pages"] as PageCollection;
        }
    }
}

Update

It turns out that there were a few issues that needed to be addressed:

1) The web.config needs to be changed to be a section instead of a sectiongroup and the pages element should be removed:

  <configSections>
    <section name="site" type="MyProject.Configuration.Site, MyProject.Configuration">
    </section>
  </configSections>

2) The Site class needs to be modified:

public class Site : ConfigurationSection
{
    [ConfigurationProperty("pages")]
    [ConfigurationCollection(typeof(PageCollection), AddItemName="page")]
    public PageCollection pages
    {
        get
        {
            return base["pages"] as PageCollection;
        }
    }
}

3) The PageCollection constructor needs to have its code removed.

    public PageCollection()
    {
    }

4) The name property needs to be removed from the PageCollection, or at least marked as not required.

5) The call to retrieve the settings is now:

Site site = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("site") as Site;

I have tested this and verified that these changes will successfully read in the config.