Can a Console Application reference its .exe.config if the .config is in another folder?

Here is the task I have been given at work. We have a Web Application for which I created a Console Application that can be executed by the Scheduled Tasks on a daily basis. The task I have be presented with is to discover if we can place the ConApp.exe and the ConApp.exe.config in two different directories (folders) in our application. We would like to place the .exe file in the bin folder with all the .dll's and place the .exe.config file in a central configurations folder. I have been looking around in the properties and such with in Visual Studio and I do not see any options that will allow me to specify to the ConApp.exe the location of the ConApp.exe.config.

Is there a way to place these two files in separate folders or do they need to be in the same folder and have the .exe.con开发者_JAVA技巧fing reference a central .config file?

Thanks, :)

You should be able to use ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration to do that. You can add a setting in the console application's config file that points out the path and filename to the config file, and pass that value to OpenExeConfiguration (granted that the console runs as an account that has read access to the location where the config file is stored).

Note that if your console app contains statements like ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["somekey"], these will need some rewriting so that they use the Configuration object returned by the OpenExeConfiguration method.

The automatic discovery of the .exe.config works only if the files are in the same folder. But you gave the answer yourself IMHO: have the .exe.config reference another .config file in the desired central location.

No, you cannot tell your app to look in another directory for its main app.config.

What you can do is externalize certain configuration sections to external files in another directory:

<configuration>
   <appSettings configSource="config\appSettings.config" />
   <connectionStrings configSource="config\connections.config" />
</configuration>

This works - even though in the Visual Studio designer there will be complaints about this - on any .NET configuration section (but not on section groups, e.g. you cannot externalize the entire <system.web> or <system.serviceModel> at once - you need to do it by their sub-elements.

So with help from Fredrik Mork I was able to figure out this solution. First of all when you create your Console Applications, DO NOT, create any setting in the projects properties window. This will create an app.config file in your project which I believe the executable will try to look for and crash if it doesn't find it. When you first create the Console Application and then Build it before writing any code. Visual Studio create the Debug folder with just the executable file and a few supporting files. I then placed this code in the "main" function:

Dim fileMap As ExeConfigurationFileMap = New ExeConfigurationFileMap()

fileMap.ExeConfigFilename = "....../AppName.config"

Dim externalConfig As Configuration = ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration(fileMap, ConfigurationUserLevel.None)

Dim appS As AppSettingsSection = externalConfig.Sections("appSettings")

Dim reportURL As String = appS.Settings("URL").Value

Console.Writeline(reportURL)

In the 2nd line "fileMap.ExeConfigFilename = "....../AppName.exe.config" then "......" represent the full pathname to the config file and AppName is the name of your file. Now I also tried to copy the code from my original Console Application and run it but it still crashed. I think it is due to the .dlls that I am using which make calls to Stored Procedures on the database. I believe these dlls are looking for the .config file to be in the same folder since that is the way they were built. However, if you are careful when you begin writing your application you can utilize Web.config information like I did above.