Web.config Tutorial

Web.config Tutorial

by: Gsuttie

Use the appSettings part of the Web.Config to store connection strings. This xml can then be modified anytime later and the next time a user browses to the site it will pick this new setting up.

One connection string is to Oracle and the Other is to SQL server

<appSettings>
    <add key="ORACLEConnectionString" value="Provider=OraOLEDB.Oracle.1;
Persist Security Info=False;Password=blah;User ID=greg;Data Source=sph;" />
    <add key="SQLConnectionString" value="data source=SQL1;initial catalog=ID_V;
integrated security=SSPI;persist security info=False;workstation id=TH03D374;
packet size=4096"/>   
<appSettings>

To get the values of the connections trings you would use

string conn = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["ORACLEConnectionString"];
OleDbConnection myConnection = new OleDbConnection(conn);

When the site goes live change the debug setting to false which will make the site have a little better performance.

<compilation defaultLanguage="C#" debug="true" />

Customer errors can be handled be turned off but I prefer them to be turned on as below.

<customErrors mode="Off" />

<customErrors defaultRedirect="ErrorPage.aspx" mode="On">   
    <error statusCode="500" redirect="servererror.aspx" />
    <error statusCode="404" redirect="filenotfound.aspx" />
    <error statusCode="403" redirect="AccessDenied.aspx" /> 
</customErrors>

Application Tracing can be set up while shows the output times and all sorts of info of every page if you set it the values to true below. Local only would mean only onthe webserver hosting the site. You can also do per page tracing so that you can turn off application Tracing and have trace="true" at the top of a single page.

<trace enabled="true" requestLimit="10" pageOutput="true" traceMode="SortByTime" 
     localOnly="true"/>