Using ConfigurationManager to load config from an arbitrary location

Question

I m developing a data access component that will be used in a website that contains a mix of classic ASP and ASP NET pages  and need a good way to manage its configuration settings   I d like to use a custom ConfigurationSection  and for the ASP NET pages this works great   But when the component is called via COM interop from a classic ASP page  the component isn t running in the context of an ASP NET request and therefore has no knowledge of web config   Is there a way to tell the ConfigurationManager to just load the configuration from an arbitrary path  e g     web config if my assembly is in the  bin folder    If there is then I m thinking my component can fall back to that if the default ConfigurationManager GetSection returns null for my custom section   Any other approaches to this would be welcome

User · Answer

Use XML processing   var appPath   AppDomain CurrentDomain BaseDirectory  var configPath   Path Combine appPath  baseFileName    var root   XElement Load configPath       can call root Elements

User · Answer

This should do the trick    AppDomain CurrentDomain SetData  APP CONFIG FILE    newAppConfig config     Source   https   www codeproject com Articles 616065 Why-Where-and-How-of-NET-Configuration-Files

User · Answer

For ASP NET use WebConfigurationManager   var config   WebConfigurationManager OpenWebConfiguration    Sites     requestDomain              config AppSettings Settings  xxxx   Value

User · Answer

In addition to Ishmaeel s answer  the method OpenMappedMachineConfiguration   will always return a Configuration object  So to check to see if it loaded you should check the HasFile property where true means it came from a file

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Try this   System Configuration ConfigurationFileMap fileMap   new ConfigurationFileMap strConfigPath     Path to your config file System Configuration Configuration configuration   System Configuration ConfigurationManager OpenMappedMachineConfiguration fileMap

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The accepted answer is wrong    It throws the following exception on accessing the AppSettings property      Unable to cast object of type  System Configuration DefaultSection  to type  System Configuration AppSettingsSection     Here is the correct solution   System Configuration ExeConfigurationFileMap fileMap   new ExeConfigurationFileMap    fileMap ExeConfigFilename    YourFilePath   System Configuration Configuration configuration   System Configuration ConfigurationManager OpenMappedExeConfiguration fileMap  ConfigurationUserLevel None

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Ishmaeel s answer generally does work  however I found one issue  which is that using OpenMappedMachineConfiguration seems to lose your inherited section groups from machine config  This means that you can access your own custom sections  which is all the OP wanted   but not the normal system sections  For example  this code will not work   ConfigurationFileMap fileMap   new ConfigurationFileMap strConfigPath   Configuration configuration   ConfigurationManager OpenMappedMachineConfiguration fileMap   MailSettingsSectionGroup thisMail   configuration GetSectionGroup  system net mailSettings   as MailSettingsSectionGroup      returns null   Basically  if you put a watch on the configuration SectionGroups  you ll see that system net is not registered as a SectionGroup  so it s pretty much inaccessible via the normal channels   There are two ways I found to work around this  The first  which I don t like  is to re-implement the system section groups by copying them from machine config into your own web config e g    lt sectionGroup name  system net  type  System Net Configuration NetSectionGroup  System  Version 2 0 0 0  Culture neutral  PublicKeyToken b77a5c561934e089  gt     lt sectionGroup name  mailSettings  type  System Net Configuration MailSettingsSectionGroup  System  Version 2 0 0 0  Culture neutral  PublicKeyToken b77a5c561934e089  gt       lt section name  smtp  type  System Net Configuration SmtpSection  System  Version 2 0 0 0  Culture neutral  PublicKeyToken b77a5c561934e089    gt     lt  sectionGroup gt   lt  sectionGroup gt    I m not sure the web application itself will run correctly after that  but you can access the sectionGroups correctly   The second solution it is instead to open your web config as an EXE configuration  which is probably closer to its intended function anyway   ExeConfigurationFileMap fileMap   new ExeConfigurationFileMap     ExeConfigFilename   strConfigPath    Configuration configuration   ConfigurationManager OpenMappedExeConfiguration fileMap  ConfigurationUserLevel None   MailSettingsSectionGroup thisMail   configuration GetSectionGroup  system net mailSettings   as MailSettingsSectionGroup      returns valid object    I daresay none of the answers provided here  neither mine or Ishmaeel s  are quite using these functions how the  NET designers intended  But  this seems to work for me

User · Answer

I provided the configuration values to word hosted  nET Compoent as follows   A  NET Class Library component being called hosted in MS Word   To provide configuration values to my component  I created winword exe config in C  Program Files Microsoft Office OFFICE11 folder   You should be able to read configurations values like You do in Traditional  NET   string sMsg   System Configuration ConfigurationManager AppSettings  WSURL

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Another solution is to override the default environment configuration file path   I find it the best solution for the of non-trivial-path configuration file load  specifically the best way to attach configuration file to dll   AppDomain CurrentDomain SetData  APP CONFIG FILE    lt Full Path To The Configuration File gt      Example   AppDomain CurrentDomain SetData  APP CONFIG FILE     C  Shared app config      More details may be found at this blog    Additionally  this other answer has an excellent solution  complete with code to refresh  the app config and an IDisposable object to reset it back to it s original state  With this solution  you can keep the temporary app config scoped   using AppConfig Change tempFileName            tempFileName is used for the app config during this context

[asp.net] Using ConfigurationManager to load config from an arbitrary location

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