Using ConfigurationManager to load config from an arbitrary location

Mike Powell picture Mike Powell · Aug 7, 2008 · Viewed 101.4k times · Source

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!

Answer

Ishmaeel picture Ishmaeel · Aug 7, 2008

Try this:

System.Configuration.ConfigurationFileMap fileMap = new ConfigurationFileMap(strConfigPath); //Path to your config file
System.Configuration.Configuration configuration = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedMachineConfiguration(fileMap);