We have a WCF service that needs to be deployed to 200 plus customers’ servers. We would like to be able to make a portion of the web.config available for customization by using the configSource attribute like so:
<bindings configSource="bindings.config" />
This allows us to overwrite the main web.config file with future upgrades while not overwriting customers’ own modifications to the sections that we decide to externalize this way. Unfortunately, there’s a problem with this – according to this article, “When you use the configSource attribute, you must move the entire section to a separate file because there is no merging of element settings.” This means that any section we put in an external file is now outside of our reach for upgrades and changes without having to mess with the external files that the customer may have made modifications to.
Is there any way around this? Can we have our cake and eat it too, or do we have to decide between having control ourselves and giving our customers flexibility?
Well it appears there’s no way around this, you can only do it one way or the other. In the end the decision we made was to use configSource and externalize certain portions of the web.config, knowing that those would be outside of our control but that the vast majority of our web.config would still be available for future modifications.