ConfigurationManager - get section inside of section group

Question

I'm trying to do something very simple: Read the contents of a section that is part of a section group in my App.config file.

This should be easy - right?

Turns out I've been trying to do this for an hour, tons of googling and debugging, and I just can't do it. When I use ConfigurationManager.GetSection , it returns null - this only works when the desired section is not part of a section group.

All I've found so far is this page by Microsoft that suggests parsing the XML myself. Seriously!?!?

I hope someone can help me, because right now this just makes me wanna hack it together with YAML in 5 minutes and never use .NET in the future.

Answer 1

You should be able access them as key/value pairs:

NameValueCollection section = (NameValueCollection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("SectionName");
string userName = section["userName"];

Try casting and see if you get the same result. If not the Linq to XML answer is always a good fallback.

var section = XDocument.Load(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ConfigurationFile).Root.Element("SectionName");

var userName= (string)section.Element("SomeElement").Elements("add")
    .Where(x => (string)x.Attribute("key") == "userName")
    .Single().Attribute("value");