How to get configuration element

Question

Helo

Can anybody explain me how to get configuration element from .config file. I know how to handle attributes but not elements. As example, I want to parse following:

<MySection enabled="true">

 <header><![CDATA[  <div> .... </div>  ]]></header>

 <title> .... </title>

</MySection>

My c# code looks like this so far:

 public class MyConfiguration : ConfigurationSection
    { 
        [ConfigurationProperty("enabled", DefaultValue = "true")]
        public bool Enabled
        {
            get { return this["enabled"].ToString().ToLower() == "true" ? true : false;   }
        }

        [ConfigurationProperty("header")]
        public string header
        {
                ???
        }
  }

It works with attributes, how do I do with elements (header property in above code) ?

Answer 1

There is another approach for doing the same thing.

We could create an element by overriding DeserializeElement method to get string value:

public class EmailTextElement : ConfigurationElement {

    public string Value { get; private set; }

    protected override void DeserializeElement(XmlReader reader, bool s) {
        Value = reader.ReadElementContentAs(typeof(string), null) as string;
    }

}

Answer 2

Here's a pretty good custom config section designer tool you can use (and it's free):

Configuration Section Designer

EDIT:

I was looking into MSDN and it seems that custom config sections can't do what you want, ie. getting the config value from an element. Custom config elements can contain other config elements, but the config values always come from attributes.

Maybe you can put your html snippets into other files and refer to them from the config, like this.

<MySection enabled="true"> 
  <header filename="myheader.txt" />
  <title filename="mytitle.txt" />
</MySection>