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Mario Sannum

Mario is an Software Architect / Developer and IT Consultant at Sigma. He has been working as a full time developer since 2007, though his interests in developing go even further back. Primarily focusing on .Net-technologies, like C#, ASP.NET, MVC, WPF, WinForms, but also WinRT, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML5, SQL, Visual Studio and more. Mario is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 3 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

Get AppSettings from web.config in a generic way

10.18.2012

| 2351 views |

public static T GetAppSetting<T>(string key, T defaultValue)
{
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(key))
    {
        string value = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[key];
        try
        {
            if (value != null)
            {
                var theType = typeof(T);
                if (theType.IsEnum)
                    return (T)Enum.Parse(theType, value.ToString(), true);

                return (T)Convert.ChangeType(value, theType);
            }

            return default(T);
        }
        catch { }
    }

    return defaultValue;
}

I use this snippet in all web projects where I need to get settings from the AppSettings section in web.config. This method (static or not) makes it easy and clean to get settings converted to the type I need. Also it enables default values to be fetched if the setting doesn't exist or can be converted to the specified type.

It can be used in different ways, like so;

<!-- Imagine we have these settings: -->
<appSettings>
    <add key="Title" value="Web title" />
    <add key="VersionNumber" value="5" />
    <add key="UseThemes" value="True" />
    <add key="WebTheme" value="Light" />
</appSettings>

And we could call it like this:

string title = GetAppSetting<string>("Title", "My title");

Even better, we could let the type be inferred from the second parameter and call it like this:

string title = GetAppSetting("Title", "My title");
int version = GetAppSetting("VersionNumber", 123);
bool useThemes = GetAppSetting("UseThemes", false);

We could also use enums, like so:

// Imagine this enum:
enum MyThemes
{
    Light,
    Dark,
    Office
}

And this would easily be called like this:

MyThemes theme = GetAppSetting("WebTheme", MyThemes.Office);

This snippet could, of course, be extended with an overload for throwing exceptions, like so:

public static T GetAppSetting(string key, T defaultValue)
{
    return GetAppSetting(key, defaultValue, false);
}

// New parameter: bool throwExceptions
public static T GetAppSetting(string key, T defaultValue, bool throwExceptions)
{
    ...
            try
            {
                ...
            }
            catch
            {
                if (throwExceptions)
                    throw;
            }
    ...
}

Tags:

Comments

Mario Sannum replied on Sat, 2012/10/20 - 6:33am

There is also an option you can do with the default value if you want deferred execution on it, by changing it to a Func<T>. This would be handy when the default value might have some logic that's heavy to execute.

For example:

public static T GetAppSetting(string key, Func<T> defaultValue)
{
    ...
    
    return defaultValue();
}

And you might call it like so:

var value = GetAppSetting("MySetting", () => MyClass.DoSomethingTimeConsuming());

// Or
var value = GetAppSetting("MySetting", () => 
{
    var builder = new StringBuilder();

    // Do heavy stuff here.

    return builder.ToString();
});

And this way the heavy stuff would only be executed if the default value is needed.