Using XML to store global variables in memory

[Davíð Þórisson]

now in my web I have some global variables to be used in many different
subpages, in the old ASP I simply loaded a variables.asp file into memory
using the eval() function. Now I'd like to use XML but what method would I
use to load the entries from the xml file into memory and make them quickly
accessible globally in the web code? Just need to know what functions
specifically I should start reading about!

Thx

 

[Guest]

XmlDocument class and its methods (like Load and LoadXML). On the other hand
I am not sure why Xml? XML is a lot of things, all of them great, but it is
hardly the best way to keep a bunch of variables. You would be better off
creating a class, making your variables members(properties) of this class and
attaching your calss to either Session or Application. I also usually declare
a static member on the class with the string id which is used to access the
object of the class from the application collection. This way you are fully
proteced from typos in you string ids

HTH, Michael

 

[Davíð Þórisson]

Thx Michael,
well you see I have several webs on the same application (using the same
core but different layouts and urls) so that the variables vary according to
which web it is. I want to be able to quickly access the web specific
variables eg
string Title = Web1.Title ...

instead of having several titles eg
string TitleForWeb1
string TitleForWeb2 ...

thats the idea!

 

[Guest]

well, with xml you will have to write something like
MyXmlDoc["Web1"].Attributes["Title"].Value
assuming that MyXmlDoc is your document looks something like
<root><Web1 Title="...."/><Web2 Title="..."/></root>
A lot of coding to what end? still you can mistype atribute name or node
name and the compiler will not tell you a thing
on the other hand with the class - you can define methods
like getTitle, which would take the web name as a parameter, and even throw
an exception to notify you that the web name is incorrect

 

[Davíð Þórisson]

good point Michael, I just cannot grasp the concept of using a Class (=code)
for storing data (normally stored as strings, dbase entries or as in my ASP
example as variables in a text file then evaled())...
I will keep your idea in mind, has some interesting aspects to look into

well, with xml you will have to write something like
MyXmlDoc["Web1"].Attributes["Title"].Value
assuming that MyXmlDoc is your document looks something like
<root><Web1 Title="...."/><Web2 Title="..."/></root>
A lot of coding to what end? still you can mistype atribute name or node
name and the compiler will not tell you a thing
on the other hand with the class - you can define methods
like getTitle, which would take the web name as a parameter, and even
throw
an exception to notify you that the web name is incorrect

Thx Michael,
well you see I have several webs on the same application (using the same
core but different layouts and urls) so that the variables vary according
to
which web it is. I want to be able to quickly access the web specific
variables eg
string Title = Web1.Title ...

instead of having several titles eg
string TitleForWeb1
string TitleForWeb2 ...

thats the idea!

 

[Davíð Þórisson]

Michael, since I'm not so experienced in .Net, how would you construct such
a class so that you can access the variables eg
string title = Web1.Title;

?

good point Michael, I just cannot grasp the concept of using a Class
(=code) for storing data (normally stored as strings, dbase entries or as
in my ASP example as variables in a text file then evaled())...
I will keep your idea in mind, has some interesting aspects to look into

well, with xml you will have to write something like
MyXmlDoc["Web1"].Attributes["Title"].Value
assuming that MyXmlDoc is your document looks something like
<root><Web1 Title="...."/><Web2 Title="..."/></root>
A lot of coding to what end? still you can mistype atribute name or node
name and the compiler will not tell you a thing
on the other hand with the class - you can define methods
like getTitle, which would take the web name as a parameter, and even
throw
an exception to notify you that the web name is incorrect

Thx Michael,
well you see I have several webs on the same application (using the same
core but different layouts and urls) so that the variables vary
according to
which web it is. I want to be able to quickly access the web specific
variables eg
string Title = Web1.Title ...

instead of having several titles eg
string TitleForWeb1
string TitleForWeb2 ...

thats the idea!

XmlDocument class and its methods (like Load and LoadXML). On the
other
hand
I am not sure why Xml? XML is a lot of things, all of them great, but
it
is
hardly the best way to keep a bunch of variables. You would be better
off
creating a class, making your variables members(properties) of this
class
and
attaching your calss to either Session or Application. I also usually
declare
a static member on the class with the string id which is used to
access
the
object of the class from the application collection. This way you are
fully
proteced from typos in you string ids

HTH, Michael

:

now in my web I have some global variables to be used in many
different
subpages, in the old ASP I simply loaded a variables.asp file into
memory
using the eval() function. Now I'd like to use XML but what method
would
I
use to load the entries from the xml file into memory and make them
quickly
accessible globally in the web code? Just need to know what functions
specifically I should start reading about!

Thx

 

[Guest]

One way of doing this would be to create a class and inherit it from
System.Web.UI.Page somthing like this:

public class MyPageClass : System.Web.UI.Page
{

private string title;
public string Title {get{return title;}}

override protected void OnInit(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnInit(e);
title = "......";
}
}

Now, after you created a new page in your project, open its code-behind
class and change the default base class it inherits from (which will be
System.Web.UI.Page) to the class you just created. This way the MyPageClass
will become an ancestor of all your pages, so anywhere in the code both in
code behind class and imbedded code you will have access to the properties
and methods you would define in MyPageClass class.
Keep in mind that a new instance of this class will be created every time
yor page is generated, so any values kept in the memebers of this class will
not survive the roundtrip.
To take care of this you would need another class wich would be instanciated
in the application start event and attached to the Application (if it is
application-wide variables). The MyPage class would retrieve this object and
populate the values.

The beauty of this approach is that you have all functionality of
application scope variables easily accessible from any of your pages: to
access the title from a page all you need to do is to write this.Title or
just Title. Compiler will check for you both the names and the data types of
all your variables. And all details of how it is implemented are hidden in a
single central place.

Michael, since I'm not so experienced in .Net, how would you construct such
a class so that you can access the variables eg
string title = Web1.Title;

?

good point Michael, I just cannot grasp the concept of using a Class
(=code) for storing data (normally stored as strings, dbase entries or as
in my ASP example as variables in a text file then evaled())...
I will keep your idea in mind, has some interesting aspects to look into

well, with xml you will have to write something like
MyXmlDoc["Web1"].Attributes["Title"].Value
assuming that MyXmlDoc is your document looks something like
<root><Web1 Title="...."/><Web2 Title="..."/></root>
A lot of coding to what end? still you can mistype atribute name or node
name and the compiler will not tell you a thing
on the other hand with the class - you can define methods
like getTitle, which would take the web name as a parameter, and even
throw
an exception to notify you that the web name is incorrect



:

Thx Michael,
well you see I have several webs on the same application (using the same
core but different layouts and urls) so that the variables vary
according to
which web it is. I want to be able to quickly access the web specific
variables eg
string Title = Web1.Title ...

instead of having several titles eg
string TitleForWeb1
string TitleForWeb2 ...

thats the idea!

XmlDocument class and its methods (like Load and LoadXML). On the
other
hand
I am not sure why Xml? XML is a lot of things, all of them great, but
it
is
hardly the best way to keep a bunch of variables. You would be better
off
creating a class, making your variables members(properties) of this
class
and
attaching your calss to either Session or Application. I also usually
declare
a static member on the class with the string id which is used to
access
the
object of the class from the application collection. This way you are
fully
proteced from typos in you string ids

HTH, Michael

:

now in my web I have some global variables to be used in many
different
subpages, in the old ASP I simply loaded a variables.asp file into
memory
using the eval() function. Now I'd like to use XML but what method
would
I
use to load the entries from the xml file into memory and make them
quickly
accessible globally in the web code? Just need to know what functions
specifically I should start reading about!

Thx

 

[Kevin Spencer]

Hang on a second, David. XML is great stuff, but it isn't the end-all and
be-all of programming. You stated that you have some "global variables to be
used in many different subpages." I would guess that means in-memory
objects. Now, XML is a great tool for passing data around in a distributed
application, as it is non-proprietry, and can be understood by any XML
client. But which of the following uses less memory space and processing in
your application:

Binary: 32767 (16 bits)

XML:

<data name="$this.TrayHeight" type="System.Int32, mscorlib,
Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089">
<value>32767</value>
</data>

IOW, XML is great for what its great for, and lousy for what it's lousy for.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

 

[Kevin Spencer]

My apologies, David.

After re-reading your question and my response, I can see that I was not
answering the question you asked, which is how to read data stored in an XML
file INTO memory, which is something altogether different from storing XML
data IN memory. Reading it from a file is a great idea, as exemplified by
the use of XML for the web.config and other configuration files that ASP.Net
and .Net in general uses.

In fact, using the web.config file might be your best bet to begin with. You
can easily use the built-in "appSettings" element in the web.config to
define your own data, which can easily be read from the file at run time.
Example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="ConnectionString"
value="server=blah;uid=Blah;pwd=blahblah;database=blah"/>
<add key="VoyagerPath" value="C:\VoyagerOnline" />
<add key="Timeout" value="15" />
</appSettings>
....

These configuration elements are easy to fetch at run-time. Example:

Dim Timeout As int =
System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("Timeout")

You can also define custom configuration sections, if you have a lot of data
and need to organize it into a nice tree hierarchy.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

 

[Davíð Þórisson]

exactly Kevin, sounds exactly like I need and want to do... so simple and
elegant solution - thx!

 

[Davíð Þórisson]

Kevin, so far so good but .Net doesn't allow me to split the appsettings
into subgroups eg
<appSettings>
<Web1Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 1"/>
...
</Web1Group>
<Web2Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 2"/>
...
</Web2Group>
</appSettings>

The error I get: "Unrecognized element."

 

[Kevin Spencer]

Correct. Remember I mentioned that you can create your own customized
Sections? That's what you need here. See the following SDK article for more
information about how:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../cpguide/html/cpcondeclaringsectiongroups.asp

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

 

[Davíð Þórisson]

I have to admit this is far beyond my knowledge so I just try to copy &
paste with some common sense... so far I've got the xml file correct but

NameValueCollection sampleConfig =
(NameValueCollection)ConfigurationSettings.GetConfig("mySectionGroup/myWeb1");
string strKeyValue = (string)sampleConfig["Title"];
myLabel.Text = myVar;

just brings on an error (surprise): "The type or namespace name
'NameValueCollection' could not be found (are you missing a using directive
or an assembly reference?)"

 

[Kevin Spencer]

If the type cannot be found, one or both of 2 things is happening. Either
you haven't referenced the assembly (DLL), or you haven't added a using
statement to negate the necessity of using the complete NameSpace hierarchy
in your code. The complete NameSpace for NameValueCollection is
"System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection".

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

I have to admit this is far beyond my knowledge so I just try to copy &
paste with some common sense... so far I've got the xml file correct but

NameValueCollection sampleConfig =
(NameValueCollection)ConfigurationSettings.GetConfig("mySectionGroup/myWeb1"
);
string strKeyValue = (string)sampleConfig["Title"];
myLabel.Text = myVar;

just brings on an error (surprise): "The type or namespace name
'NameValueCollection' could not be found (are you missing a using directive
or an assembly reference?)"

Correct. Remember I mentioned that you can create your own customized
Sections? That's what you need here. See the following SDK article for
more
information about how:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../cpguide/html/cpcondeclaringsectiongroups.asp

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

storing
XML exemplified
by

 

[Davíð Þórisson]

Kevin
could you kindly email me, I'm so close to getting this done (the using
statement is there) still some error I can't figure out

If the type cannot be found, one or both of 2 things is happening. Either
you haven't referenced the assembly (DLL), or you haven't added a using
statement to negate the necessity of using the complete NameSpace
hierarchy
in your code. The complete NameSpace for NameValueCollection is
"System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection".

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

I have to admit this is far beyond my knowledge so I just try to copy &
paste with some common sense... so far I've got the xml file correct but

NameValueCollection sampleConfig =
(NameValueCollection)ConfigurationSettings.GetConfig("mySectionGroup/myWeb1"
);
string strKeyValue = (string)sampleConfig["Title"];
myLabel.Text = myVar;

just brings on an error (surprise): "The type or namespace name
'NameValueCollection' could not be found (are you missing a using directive
or an assembly reference?)"

Correct. Remember I mentioned that you can create your own customized
Sections? That's what you need here. See the following SDK article for
more
information about how:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../cpguide/html/cpcondeclaringsectiongroups.asp

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

Kevin, so far so good but .Net doesn't allow me to split the appsettings
into subgroups eg
<appSettings>
<Web1Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 1"/>
...
</Web1Group>
<Web2Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 2"/>
...
</Web2Group>
</appSettings>

The error I get: "Unrecognized element."



My apologies, David.

After re-reading your question and my response, I can see that I was
not
answering the question you asked, which is how to read data stored
in
an
XML
file INTO memory, which is something altogether different from storing
XML
data IN memory. Reading it from a file is a great idea, as exemplified
by
the use of XML for the web.config and other configuration files that
ASP.Net
and .Net in general uses.

In fact, using the web.config file might be your best bet to begin
with.
You
can easily use the built-in "appSettings" element in the web.config to
define your own data, which can easily be read from the file at run
time.
Example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="ConnectionString"
value="server=blah;uid=Blah;pwd=blahblah;database=blah"/>
<add key="VoyagerPath" value="C:\VoyagerOnline" />
<add key="Timeout" value="15" />
</appSettings>
...

These configuration elements are easy to fetch at run-time. Example:

Dim Timeout As int =
System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("Timeout")

You can also define custom configuration sections, if you have a lot of
data
and need to organize it into a nice tree hierarchy.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

now in my web I have some global variables to be used in many
different
subpages, in the old ASP I simply loaded a variables.asp file into
memory
using the eval() function. Now I'd like to use XML but what method
would
I
use to load the entries from the xml file into memory and make them
quickly
accessible globally in the web code? Just need to know what functions
specifically I should start reading about!

Thx

 

[Kevin Spencer]

Hi David,

I'm afraid I don't help people by email, for a number of reasons too long to
go into here.

I will be happy to continue helping you on this newsgroup, however, if you
can tell me where you're having trouble. the article (and related articles)
should give you what you need to know. The section head for the article I
pointed you to is at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/e...onconfigurationsectionhandlers.asp?frame=true

but I can also answer any specific questions you may have.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

Kevin
could you kindly email me, I'm so close to getting this done (the using
statement is there) still some error I can't figure out

If the type cannot be found, one or both of 2 things is happening. Either
you haven't referenced the assembly (DLL), or you haven't added a using
statement to negate the necessity of using the complete NameSpace
hierarchy
in your code. The complete NameSpace for NameValueCollection is
"System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection".

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

I have to admit this is far beyond my knowledge so I just try to copy &
paste with some common sense... so far I've got the xml file correct but

NameValueCollection sampleConfig =

(NameValueCollection)ConfigurationSettings.GetConfig("mySectionGroup/myWeb1"
);

string strKeyValue = (string)sampleConfig["Title"];
myLabel.Text = myVar;

just brings on an error (surprise): "The type or namespace name
'NameValueCollection' could not be found (are you missing a using directive
or an assembly reference?)"


Correct. Remember I mentioned that you can create your own customized
Sections? That's what you need here. See the following SDK article for
more
information about how:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../cpguide/html/cpcondeclaringsectiongroups.asp

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

Kevin, so far so good but .Net doesn't allow me to split the appsettings
into subgroups eg
<appSettings>
<Web1Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 1"/>
...
</Web1Group>
<Web2Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 2"/>
...
</Web2Group>
</appSettings>

The error I get: "Unrecognized element."



My apologies, David.

After re-reading your question and my response, I can see that I was
not
answering the question you asked, which is how to read data stored
in
an
XML
file INTO memory, which is something altogether different from storing
XML
data IN memory. Reading it from a file is a great idea, as exemplified
by
the use of XML for the web.config and other configuration files that
ASP.Net
and .Net in general uses.

In fact, using the web.config file might be your best bet to begin
with.
You
can easily use the built-in "appSettings" element in the

web.config
to

define your own data, which can easily be read from the file at run
time.
Example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="ConnectionString"
value="server=blah;uid=Blah;pwd=blahblah;database=blah"/>
<add key="VoyagerPath" value="C:\VoyagerOnline" />
<add key="Timeout" value="15" />
</appSettings>
...

These configuration elements are easy to fetch at run-time. Example:

Dim Timeout As int =
System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("Timeout")

You can also define custom configuration sections, if you have a

lot
of

data
and need to organize it into a nice tree hierarchy.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

now in my web I have some global variables to be used in many
different
subpages, in the old ASP I simply loaded a variables.asp file into
memory
using the eval() function. Now I'd like to use XML but what method
would
I
use to load the entries from the xml file into memory and make them
quickly
accessible globally in the web code? Just need to know what functions
specifically I should start reading about!

Thx

 

[Davíð Þórisson]

no prob Kevin, I understand.
After some Googling I finally managed to solve this although I don't know at
all why. What I did was changing:
<section name="mySection"
type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler,System/>
to:
<section name="mySection"
type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler,System,
Version=1.0.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089,
Custom=null" />

god knows what that Version bla bla does but it works!!! (I always thought
XML was sooo easy and clean code)

Hi David,

I'm afraid I don't help people by email, for a number of reasons too long
to
go into here.

I will be happy to continue helping you on this newsgroup, however, if
you
can tell me where you're having trouble. the article (and related
articles)
should give you what you need to know. The section head for the article I
pointed you to is at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/e...onconfigurationsectionhandlers.asp?frame=true

but I can also answer any specific questions you may have.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

Kevin
could you kindly email me, I'm so close to getting this done (the using
statement is there) still some error I can't figure out

If the type cannot be found, one or both of 2 things is happening. Either
you haven't referenced the assembly (DLL), or you haven't added a using
statement to negate the necessity of using the complete NameSpace
hierarchy
in your code. The complete NameSpace for NameValueCollection is
"System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection".

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living


I have to admit this is far beyond my knowledge so I just try to copy
&
paste with some common sense... so far I've got the xml file correct but

NameValueCollection sampleConfig =

(NameValueCollection)ConfigurationSettings.GetConfig("mySectionGroup/myWeb1"
);
string strKeyValue = (string)sampleConfig["Title"];
myLabel.Text = myVar;

just brings on an error (surprise): "The type or namespace name
'NameValueCollection' could not be found (are you missing a using
directive
or an assembly reference?)"


Correct. Remember I mentioned that you can create your own
customized
Sections? That's what you need here. See the following SDK article for
more
information about how:


http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../cpguide/html/cpcondeclaringsectiongroups.asp

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

Kevin, so far so good but .Net doesn't allow me to split the
appsettings
into subgroups eg
<appSettings>
<Web1Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 1"/>
...
</Web1Group>
<Web2Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 2"/>
...
</Web2Group>
</appSettings>

The error I get: "Unrecognized element."



My apologies, David.

After re-reading your question and my response, I can see that I was
not
answering the question you asked, which is how to read data
stored
in
an
XML
file INTO memory, which is something altogether different from
storing
XML
data IN memory. Reading it from a file is a great idea, as
exemplified
by
the use of XML for the web.config and other configuration files that
ASP.Net
and .Net in general uses.

In fact, using the web.config file might be your best bet to
begin
with.
You
can easily use the built-in "appSettings" element in the web.config
to
define your own data, which can easily be read from the file at run
time.
Example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="ConnectionString"
value="server=blah;uid=Blah;pwd=blahblah;database=blah"/>
<add key="VoyagerPath" value="C:\VoyagerOnline" />
<add key="Timeout" value="15" />
</appSettings>
...

These configuration elements are easy to fetch at run-time. Example:

Dim Timeout As int =
System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("Timeout")

You can also define custom configuration sections, if you have a lot
of
data
and need to organize it into a nice tree hierarchy.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

now in my web I have some global variables to be used in many
different
subpages, in the old ASP I simply loaded a variables.asp file into
memory
using the eval() function. Now I'd like to use XML but what method
would
I
use to load the entries from the xml file into memory and make them
quickly
accessible globally in the web code? Just need to know what
functions
specifically I should start reading about!

Thx

 

[Kevin Spencer]

Aha! Well, there you go. Nice work, David.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

no prob Kevin, I understand.
After some Googling I finally managed to solve this although I don't know at
all why. What I did was changing:
<section name="mySection"
type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler,System/>
to:
<section name="mySection"
type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler,System,
Version=1.0.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089,
Custom=null" />

god knows what that Version bla bla does but it works!!! (I always thought
XML was sooo easy and clean code)

Hi David,

I'm afraid I don't help people by email, for a number of reasons too long
to
go into here.

I will be happy to continue helping you on this newsgroup, however, if
you
can tell me where you're having trouble. the article (and related
articles)
should give you what you need to know. The section head for the article I
pointed you to is at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/e...onconfigurationsectionhandlers.asp?frame=true

but I can also answer any specific questions you may have.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

Kevin
could you kindly email me, I'm so close to getting this done (the using
statement is there) still some error I can't figure out


If the type cannot be found, one or both of 2 things is happening. Either
you haven't referenced the assembly (DLL), or you haven't added a using
statement to negate the necessity of using the complete NameSpace
hierarchy
in your code. The complete NameSpace for NameValueCollection is
"System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection".

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living


I have to admit this is far beyond my knowledge so I just try to copy
&
paste with some common sense... so far I've got the xml file correct but

NameValueCollection sampleConfig =

(NameValueCollection)ConfigurationSettings.GetConfig("mySectionGroup/myWeb1"

);
string strKeyValue = (string)sampleConfig["Title"];
myLabel.Text = myVar;

just brings on an error (surprise): "The type or namespace name
'NameValueCollection' could not be found (are you missing a using
directive
or an assembly reference?)"


Correct. Remember I mentioned that you can create your own
customized
Sections? That's what you need here. See the following SDK article for
more
information about how:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../cpguide/html/cpcondeclaringsectiongroups.asp

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

Kevin, so far so good but .Net doesn't allow me to split the
appsettings
into subgroups eg
<appSettings>
<Web1Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 1"/>
...
</Web1Group>
<Web2Group>
<add key="Title" value="Title of web 2"/>
...
</Web2Group>
</appSettings>

The error I get: "Unrecognized element."



My apologies, David.

After re-reading your question and my response, I can see that

I
was

not
answering the question you asked, which is how to read data
stored
in
an
XML
file INTO memory, which is something altogether different from
storing
XML
data IN memory. Reading it from a file is a great idea, as
exemplified
by
the use of XML for the web.config and other configuration files that
ASP.Net
and .Net in general uses.

In fact, using the web.config file might be your best bet to
begin
with.
You
can easily use the built-in "appSettings" element in the web.config
to
define your own data, which can easily be read from the file at run
time.
Example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="ConnectionString"
value="server=blah;uid=Blah;pwd=blahblah;database=blah"/>
<add key="VoyagerPath" value="C:\VoyagerOnline" />
<add key="Timeout" value="15" />
</appSettings>
...

These configuration elements are easy to fetch at run-time. Example:

Dim Timeout As int =
System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("Timeout")

You can also define custom configuration sections, if you have

a
lot

of
data
and need to organize it into a nice tree hierarchy.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
.Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
I get paid good money to
solve puzzles for a living

now in my web I have some global variables to be used in many
different
subpages, in the old ASP I simply loaded a variables.asp file into
memory
using the eval() function. Now I'd like to use XML but what method
would
I
use to load the entries from the xml file into memory and make them
quickly
accessible globally in the web code? Just need to know what
functions
specifically I should start reading about!

Thx