Saving specific application configuration data to Sharepoint?

Question

I am doing WebPart Sharepoint 2010 with the functionality of another main web application. To quickly develop Webpart, I imported the business logic assemblies used in the main web application. Webpart runs and extracts information about a specific application configuration from the web.config Sharepoint file.

Is this the best place to store this information?

If not..

Where / How should the specific application configuration data be stored in Sharepoint?

Configuration data contains items such as web service locations, etc. Data should only be edited by system administrators.

thanks

Answer 1

Web.Config is IMHO, a terrible place to store this kind of configuration information - it's hard to deploy and hard to change, especially if you use multiple web interfaces.

The recommended way to do this is to use the PropertyBag (key / value pairs) through .Properties SPFarm, SPWeb.RootWeb (for site collections), SPWeb, SPList, etc. (depending on the area you need).

MSDN - Manage Customizing Settings for a SharePoint Application

There is a ready-made production code that is available as part of

MSDN - SharePoint Guide Library

See Hierarchical Configuration Manager

This gives you programmatic read / write access to these values. If you want to do this without using the instruction library, you should use something like the following code.

SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web; if (web.Properties.ContainsKey("MyProperty")) string myProperty = web.Properties["MyProperty"]; 

If you want the user interface to allow administrators to easily set values, use something like the SharePoint Property Pack Settings

Answer 2

The easiest way to do this is to create a sharepoint list that is visible only to the administrator. It can have 3 columns description , title , value . It will save all configuration values. You can also add a link to this list on the site settings page.

Answer 3

A web config is always a good place. However, if you want to change this data, you will have to force some kind of recompilation of the site, which is a pain for end users.

Theres a nice little app / solution on codeplex to do with the sum of properties

http://pbs.codeplex.com/

This is a brilliant little application / solution that is related to your central administration.

It should be built in, I think.

Hope this helps.