How to get a hold of the web.config file in a web application?
ASP.NET has a WebConfigurationManager class that has a method called OpenMappedWebConfiguration. It can be used to open a web application configuration file as a configuration object. OpenMappedWebConfiguration has three overloads, and we can use the first one to open the web.config file:
WebConfigurationManager.OpenMappedWebConfiguration Method (WebConfigurationFileMap, String)
The first parameter is a WebConfigurationFileMap object, which specify the web file hierarchy. The second parameter is the virtual path to the configuration file.
So, first we need to create a WebConfigurationFileMap object:
Dim fileMap As New WebConfigurationFileMap()
Dim physDir As String = Server.MapPath(Request.ApplicationPath)
Dim vDirMap As New VirtualDirectoryMapping(physDir, True, "web.config")
fileMap.VirtualDirectories.Add("/", vDirMap)Now, we can use OpenMappedWebConfiguration method to open the configuration file:
Dim config As System.Configuration.Configuration = WebConfigurationManager.OpenMappedWebConfiguration(fileMap, "/config")
With the config object, you can loop through it to get a specific value of a specific section. For example, the following line of code will display the first connection string value in web.config file:
Response.Write("Connection String: " & config.ConnectionStrings.ConnectionString(0))Happy programming!
