Question

Right, so I have a Windows service that goes off and does some work on a server every few minutes. The service reads a whole lot of info (host, username, port etc) regarding the server it’s connecting to from the App.config and it works just great.

I now have a requirement that the service caters for n different servers. So now my service needs to read from the App.config and do what it needs to do for server1..serverN sequentially. Wait a predetermined time and then start at server1 again.

I don’t know how or what would be the best way to store n sets of server settings in the App.config and then programatically determine how many sets of settings there are and then read each set.

I’ve thought of having a setting that tells me that there are 5 servers and then having settings for server1..server5 but that’s really not elegant.

Is there a better way to do this?

My full source file is below:

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Text;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Xml;

namespace FTPConfig
{
    public class MyAppConfig : ConfigurationSection
    {
        public static MyAppConfig GetConfiguration()
        {
            MyAppConfig configuration = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("MainSettings") as MyAppConfig;

            if (configuration != null) return configuration;

            return new MyAppConfig();
        }
    }

    [ConfigurationProperty("host", IsRequired = true)]
    public String Host 
    { 
        get 
        { 
            return this["host"] as string; 
        } 
    }
}

Answer 1

You can use a custom section in the app.config file, and use any xml you like there.