Is there a helper method to parse an appSettings-like xml?

Question

By appSettings-like I mean like this,

<appSettings>
    <add key="myKey" value="myValue" />
</appsettings>

The result is a key-value collection that I can access like:

string v = config["myKey"];

but it is not necessarily located in app.config, so what I have is a string or a XmlNode.

NameValueFileSectionHandler.Create method apparently can do the job, but the input needs two objects, Object parent, Object configContext, in addition to a xml node, and I don't know what to pass to them.

Answer 1

Parse a string to a dictionary like this,

var xml = XElement.Parse("<appSettings><add key=\"myKey\" value=\"myValue\" /></appSettings>");
var dic = xml.Descendants("add").ToDictionary(x => x.Attribute("key").Value, x => x.Attribute("value").Value);

You can get the values like this,

var item = dic["myKey"];

You can also modify the values in the dictionary like this,

dic["myKey"] = "new val";

And you can convert the modified dictionary back to a XElement using this code,

var newXml = new XElement("appSettings", dic.Select(d => new XElement("add", new XAttribute("key", d.Key), new XAttribute("value", d.Value))));

Answer 2

You could do something like this :

Hashtable htResource = new Hashtable();
    XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();
    document.LoadXml(XmlString);
    foreach (XmlNode node in document.SelectSingleNode("appSettings"))
    {
        if ((node.NodeType != XmlNodeType.Comment) && !htResource.Contains(node.Attributes["name"].Value))
            {
                htResource[node.Attributes["name"].Value] = node.Attributes["value"].Value;
            }
    }

Then you can access the values using:

string myValue = htResource["SettingName"].ToString();

Hope that helps,

Dave