Managing webconfig throughout the DTAP street

[Q&A] General
1

Hello Community!

In my application, there are DTAP instances deployed in different environments. In order to setup the integrations with external systems properly, I need to manage this in my web config. However, these values differ per environment. In my case, this is the ODBC connection string.

Is it possible to define a single connection string with differing values per deployment instance? Or should I define a connection string per environment, deploy this to all environments, and configure which config is used in each environment?

I guess the more general question is: What is the proper way of deploying and managing varying webconfigs throughout my DTAP street?

2

Hi Steffen,

In deployment: you can use the CustomWebConfigSettings to create specific settings per instance.

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If you add a new CustomWebConfigSettings to an instance the following input fields are shown:

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  • Type: In this case you want to use the Xpath type becasue the ODBC connectionstrings are not included in de AppSettings of the web.config

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  • Action. There are three different actions. The most used action is the replace variant. In your case the connectionstrings are most likely commiitted via subversion to the web.config

    • Add: adds a new node or attribute to the web.config
    • Replace: replace an existing node or attribute in the web.config
    • Remove: removes an existing node or attribute in the web.config

  • Xpath (if type = xpath). Here you type the xpath to get the single node or attribute you want to add, replace or remove. In the case the connectionstring is already present and you want to replace the connectionstring attribute you can use the following xpath expresion:

/configuration/connectionStrings/add[@name=“Test”]/@connectionString

It basically says find me the add-node inside the ConnectionStrings-node where the name attribute equals “Test” and give me its connectionString-attribute.

  • AppSettingKey (if type = AppSetting); the key of the apsettings
  • Value: here you type the desired value