Hello Nick,

From your description, you're wantting to programmtically load the
application's app.config file(exe.config or web.config) and modify some
sections/values in it or add some new custom sections, correct?

Regarding on the new ConfigurationManager and type ConfigurationSection
model in .net framework 2.0, it is designed for encapsulating the
underlying XML processing on the raw app.config file. There are serveral
reasons such model will help for our configuration management:

** Given such a set of configuration class, you can read and write
configuration information without caring about the underlying persistence
format(xml or normal text or binary file...), we just use the given
configurationManager and the related classes to access configuration
settings in our code.

** .NET application's configuration setting is of a hierarchical model,
there are global settings (from machine.config or super level web.config
for ASP.NET application). Thus, when you use ConfigurationManager class to
open a configuration, it has helped you query and merge all the settings
from global to your local settings (no only the settings in your
application's own app.config file). This is also better than we  use
file/XML I/O to read the app.config file directly(in such cases, we only
get the flat local configuration setting).

Of course, you can both modify existing configuration settings(first find
the certain Section from Configuration.Sections or SectionGroups) or add
new custom configuration section/sectiongroup. here is simple code snippet
demonstrate this:

============================
       static void AddSection()
       {
           Configuration config =
ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration("ProtectConfigConsole.exe");

//add a new sectiongroup first if you want
           ConfigurationSectionGroup group = new
ConfigurationSectionGroup();
       

           config.SectionGroups.Add("customSectionGroup", group);

//my custom section class
           MyCustomSection custsection = new MyCustomSection();
           custsection.MyAttrib1 = "abc";
           custsection.MyChildSection = new MyChildConfigElement("attr1",
"attr2");
         

           group.Sections.Add("customSection", custsection);

           config.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Full);

       }
==============================

In addition, if you want to manipulate the certain section through XML
format, you can still get it via "Section.SectionInformation.GetRawXml()"
method. Though it return string format, you can simply use XmlDocument to
load it and get the root Element and use any XML dom API on it.
e.g.

==========================
static void RunConfigData()
       {
          Configuration config=
ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None);
          ConfigurationSection section = config.GetSection("appSettings");

          XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

          doc.LoadXml(section.SectionInformation.GetRawXml());

          Console.WriteLine(doc.DocumentElement.OuterXml);
           
       }

=============================
After that, you can use "section.SectionInformation.SetRawXml" to update
the section by raw xml also.  

Hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead



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