Accessing appSettings from multiple Web.config files

Question

I am designing an ASP.NET MVC4 Web App project. In the root of my project, I have the customary default Web.config file with my corresponding elements. In particular, I have a few appSettings elements defined. As an example excerpt to demonstrate this:

<appSettings>
    <add key="foo" value="bar" />
</appSettings>

Naturally, I can access this element within code using ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["foo"]. This works perfectly for me. However, I am creating a NuGet package alongside my project. The package is installed within its own directory under my project's Areas directory. Here, in my package's root, I have another Web.config file. This is so that, when another user imports the NuGet package, the configuration for the package resources is native to the package. Let the package's Web.config contain the following:

<appSettings>
    <add key="dirEnabled" value="true" />
</appSettings>

Just to clarify in terms of relative paths, I now have two Web.config files, one at ./Web.config and one at ./Areas/PackageName/Web.config.

Within my package, I want to retrieve the value for dirEnabled. To do so, I make the call: ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["dirEnabled"]. However, this throws an error. It appears as if only the collection of appSettings is being retrieved from ./Web.config and not my package config file. Is it at all possible to grab the appSettings collection from my package's config file rather than the project root config file?

Answer 1

Figured it out! To use a different config file, incorporate WebConfigurationmanager. So, to access the appSettings of ./Areas/PackageName/Web.config, simply use:

var config = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration("~/Areas/PackageName");
string dirE = config.AppSettings.Settings["dirEnabled"].Value;

Answer 2

Try with

<appSettings file="<Path_To_Second_Web.Config>">
   ...
</appSettings >

in your project's Web.config

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa903313(v=vs.71).aspx