What s the best way to store a group of constants that my program uses

Question

I have various constants that my program uses    string s  int s double s  etc    What is the best way to store them  I don t think I want an Enum  because the data is not all the same type  and I want to manually set each value  Should I just store them all in an empty class  Or is there a better way

User · Accepted Answer

You probably could have them in a static class  with static read-only properties   public static class Routes       public static string SignUp   gt   signup

User · Answer

IMO using a class full of constants is fine for constants  If they will change semi-occasionally I recommend using AppSettings in your config and the ConfigurationManager class instead   When I have  constants  that are actually pulled in from AppSettings or similar I still will always have a  constants  class that wraps the reading from configuration manager  It s always more meaningful to have Constants SomeModule Setting instead of having to resort directly to ConfigurationManager AppSettings  SomeModule Setting   on any place that wants to consume said setting value   Bonus points for this setup  since SomeModule would likely be a nested class inside the Constants file  you could easily use Dependency Injection to inject either SomeModule directly into classes that depend on it  You could also even extract an interface on top of SomeModule and then create a depenedency to ISomeModuleConfiguration in your consuming code  this would then allow you to decouple the dependency to the Constants files  and even potentially make testing easier  especially if these settings come from AppSettings and you change them using config transformations because the settings are environment specific

User · Answer

An empty static class is appropriate   Consider using several classes  so that you end up with good groups of related constants  and not one giant Globals cs file   Additionally  for some int constants  consider the notation    Flags  enum Foo       As this allows for treating the values like flags

User · Answer

If these Constants are service references or switches that effect the application behavior I would set them up as Application user settings  That way if they need to be changed you do not have to recompile and you can still reference them through the static properties class     Properties Settings Default ServiceRef

User · Answer

Another vote for using web config or app config  The config files are a good place for constants like connection strings  etc  I prefer not to have to look at the source to view or modify these types of things  A static class which reads these constants from a  config file might be a good compromise  as it will let your application access these resources as though they were defined in code  but still give you the flexibility of having them in an easily viewable editable space

User · Answer

What I like to do is the following  but make sure to read to the end to use the proper type of constants    internal static class ColumnKeys       internal const string Date    Date       internal const string Value    Value               Read this to know why const might not be what you want  Possible type of constants are    const fields  Do not use across assemblies  public or protected  if value might change in future because the value will be hardcoded at compile-time in those other assemblies  If you change the value  the old value will be used by the other assemblies until they are re-compiled  static readonly fields static property without set

User · Answer

Yes  a static class for storing constants would be just fine  except for constants that are related to specific types

User · Answer

This is the best way IMO   No need for properties  or readonly   public static class Constants      public const string SomeConstant    Some value

User · Answer

I would suggest static class with static readonly  Please find the code snippet below     public static class CachedKeysManager               public static readonly string DistributorList    distributorList

[c#] What's the best way to store a group of constants that my program uses?

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