Question

I’m writing a class library as an abstraction to use for logging in any application, service, etc. that I write. I’m making it decently robust by making it very configurable to suit my needs for most application/service logging scenarios that I come across.

The config is designed to specify things such as:

• What logging level to write
• Write to one log file for all levels
• Write to separate files per level
• Logging cutoff (periodic, app event, byte size restricted)
• Log file expiration (delete log files after file age)
• Write as flat text or XML
• Log file name format specification
• Whether to prefix filename with date
• Parent app’s name
• etc, etc, etc…

I’ve read some other stackoverflow questions regarding configs for DLL assemblies and it causing conflict between the app.config for the hosting assembly/app. I believe that my assembly has just cause to provide a config file.

Is this a good scenario for that occasion? Is it perhaps a better idea to bake my own config into my project so that my logger reads from XML files to retrieve config values?

Answer 1

What you could do is

• create a custom configuration section (using e.g. the COnfiguration Section Designer tool)

• put your assembly’s configuration into a separate MyAssembly.config file

• reference that assembly config file from your host app’s config:

  <configuration>
     <configSections>
         <section name="YourAssembly" 
                  type="YourAssembly.ConfigSection, YourAssembly" />
     </configSections>
  
     <YourAssembly configSource="MyAssembly.config" />
  </configuration>
  

That way, you can “externalize” your configuration into a separate config file which you have only once (in your assembly’s project), and any project needing it just needs those settings in its own config file.