Config differences between environments and multiple config

Hi

One significant difference between the way Sitefinity 3 and 4 work is the way the partial configs are selected. Because of the way our build process works here, this is causing an issue for me.

In the past I've updated web.config which had references to a data.local.config, data.dev.config, data.staging.config, and data.production.config depending on the environment the code was deployed to. NAnt scripts would automatically update this reference by editing the xml of web.config to point to the appropriate partial config.

This means that some important criteria are satisfied
- all configuration information is stored in partial config files which are a part of the project, and therefore in source control
- we can tell which configuration is being used just by looking at the properties set in web.config so when investigating any issues on staging or production environments we can easily and accurately determine which partial configs are being used

DataConfig.config is referenced and loaded from somewhere in the code that's not exposed to the developer - as far as I have been able to determine.

Is there a way I can override how this partial configuration is selected, and if not can you suggest an alternative method of supporting multiple configs?

Regards

David

Hi David,

If you mean only the database configuration (connection strings), you can still use the old approach, because Sitefinity data configuration is implemented to work with both DataConfig.config and web.config. However, bare in mind that, if you have connection strings with the same name, that one in the DataConfig.config will override the other one in the web.config.
Can you specify what kind of configuration you want to differentiate between environments?

Regarding Sitefinity 4.0 configuration, you could have different configuration in different context. This could be accomplished by Configuration Policy. Currently, we have 2 policy handlers: UserPolicyHandler and RolePolicyHandler. For example, you can persist different configuration settings a specific user( or role), then if the current user is this user (or belongs to this role), this settings are applied.
It is not implemented yet, but, in the same way, you could implement a custom PolicyHandler, e.g EnvironmentPolicyHandler or DomainPolicyHandler, and persist different configuration for different environments. We hope to include this functionality in the Q2 as a part of the Personalization module, which will be based on configuration policies.
We hope this will handle any scenario. Please, do let us know if you have any notes?


Greetings,
Vlad
the Telerik team

Hi Vlad

I ended up solving this using Cruise Control and nAnt scripts to modify xml nodes on deployment. For example: