On a project I am working on, we usually keep our application settings defined in a separate file. This is how it has been done for many years, and going forward we would like to keep all system configurations in one file. I was considering to use the web.config section so I can just load the configurations that I need from my C# code running on the server using the ConfigurationManager class.
If I use our own way for the application settings, I would load it in a session and have it available for the application by loading values from the session. After some reading online it looks like some of the performance issues behind using the session is that we have to deserialize the values from the session object.
Does IIS deserialize the web.config values each time we read values using the ConfigurationManager?
Thank you,
Vijay Selvaraj
Web.config is read once upon loading of the AppDomain. It is refreshed if any changes are made to it or any referenced files (you can put sections into external files by using the configsection= attribute on a section)
No, configuration sections are deserialized into the custom classes that reflect them only when the configuration file is re-read (such as when the app pool is recycled, a change to web.config is detected, and a couple of other conditions).
See also this question.
Related
Background
I work in QA at a software company.
We have about a half a dozen different web applications, each of which may require, at any given site, some customised settings added to its web.config file.
These can range from which Oracle database/schema(s) the app connects to, to how many search results to cache, to which hierarchy to use when sorting items on a web page.
We make use of Microsoft's Deploy package, to get the new releases installed/updated on client sites.
When we put out a new release, some of these customised settings may have been added to or removed from the given web app's web.config file, but using Deploy to import the new release over the top of the old one will clobber any customisations that may have been made.
Alternatives
There are ways of handling this manually, such as merging via a plain text comparison of the old and new web.config files, but these are cumbersome and prone to human error.
I was reading about transformations and thought they could be of some use.
There is also the capability to use external files (tip #8) which seems like a good way to go.
Improvement?
Should our programmers be providing some sort of semi-automated merge facility for this web.config file? Does the Deploy package provide this somehow?
Should we be making use of the external config files, as a best practice?
Is the concept of customising this web.config file at each site so fundamentally flawed that the whole thing needs to be re-thought?
Microsoft provides Web.config transformations as the de-facto way to do this. You can create different deployment configurations within Visual Studio and the web projects. Then when you build or your build server builds with that particular configuration the web.config is transformed to contain the settings you want to see.
View more about web.config transforms here.
I use the Log4Net as my log tool, everything works really well when the test system just has a single database.
But my real system has more than one database. Different user may have the different database. I want to put the log information into different database according to the current logined user.
But so far as I know. It seems that the Log4Net does't support this topic. It seems the log4Net is configured just "once" in the lifetime.
Is it possible for me to make the log4net select database configuration basing on my information on the fly.
I found the answer:
log4net - configure using multiple configuration files
and this: http://logging.apache.org/log4net/release/manual/repositories.html
The reason I thought that Log4Net only supports one configuration is I did NOT dig. As the content of the above links said: We need to create our own repository for each configuration.
Now everything is working well, and log information goes to different databases now based on the given configuration on the fly as I expected.
I use NLog for logging and now I'm trying to also use it for my SharePoint solution.
How do I instruct WSPBuilder to include NLog.config in WSP and place it in the same folder as solution dll?
EDIT:
Okay, another option is to put it as Web.nlog in SharePoint 80 directory.
Do I need a separate feature for this? What should I write in elements.xml?
I don't think this can't be done - I assume for security reasons.
DLLs can only be deployed to GAC (signed assemblies only) or to the bin directory of the web application (deployed via the solution manifest, along with any required CAS policies).
If you want extra files alongside the assembly in the bin directory, you'll need to copy them manually.
Does NLog.config need to be a separate file, or can the settings be integrated into the web.config file? If you can integrate the settings into the web.config file, you can add a feature receiver and write the necessary settings during the FeatureActivated or FeatureInstalling event to web.config using SPWebConfigModifications (just google for it). You should also make sure to remove the settings in FeatureDeactivating or FeatureUninstalled event.
You should also take a look here :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee413935.aspx
I would also ask these questions :
Is the configuration the same for all the farm ? Only one web application ?
Can you programmaticaly specify NLog configuration ?
Depending on your answers, I will suggest one or more solutions.
The disadvantages with the web.config are
Configuration is deployed on all SharePoint servers (the feature take care of that, but you have to keep that in mind in case of inconsistant behavior)
If you want to modify settings there is no easy way
Each time you modify settings, it will recycle application pool.
Our product consists of client, server and agents. Each deployed on different machines. The QA is having a hard time to manipulate the log4net sections in the respective config files. Right now, they have to have remote desktops to all the relevant machines and open notepad in each of them and then edit the files one at a time switching between different machines as they proceed. A real pain in the ass.
Can anyone suggest a better solution to this problem?
Thanks.
You could store the log4net configuration in a database (you could then even consider to create a web interface that allows your QA team to modify the configuration). You have to figure out how your applications pick up the new configuration (e.g. you have some remote Admin interface that allows you to tell your applications to use the new configuration).
On start-up you load the configuration from there. Maybe it is advisable to have some backup configuration in a file that is loaded first in case loading from the database fails. The default configuration would be for instance so that the QA team gets an email if loading the configuration from the database fails.
Another option would be to store all log4net configuration files on a network share... create an application setting that tells your application where to find the log4net configuration and call the Configure() method accordingly. Again the question is how your applications pick up the new configuration.
Not sure if ConfigureAndWatch() would behave as expected if the configuration files is on a network share. If so that would be quite an easy option to implement.
Our site is currently set to pass all files with the xml file extension through the asp.net worker process because all the xml files on the site at the moment are generated dynamically on being hit, by writing the output directly into the response stream.
However we now have a requirement to add a file which is much larger and takes several minutes to generate in this way. I wrote a console app to generate the file and set it to run nightly, but because of the global IIS setting directing xml files to run through asp_wp, it's not being served properly.
I can't seem to find a way to make an exemption for the treatment of a single file in the IIS settings. Is there any other way we can do it?
Cheers,
Matt
As far as I know, this is not possible for a single file, but you can do it for a whole folder.
You simply place a web.config file in the folder in question and configure the settings you need there.