I currently have a .NET custom configurationsection that looks like this:
<customSection name="My section" />
What I want is to write it as a textnode (I'm not sure if this is the correct term?) like this:
<customSection>
<name>My Section</name>
</customSection>
My current customSection class looks like this:
public class CustomSection: ConfigurationSection {
[ConfigurationProperty("name")]
public String Name {
get {
return (String)this["name"];
}
}
}
What should I do to make it a textnode?
A bit of research suggests that the existing configuration classes do not support that type of element without creating a custom class to handle it. This CodeProject article covers creating a new ConfigurationTextElement
class that is generic and can parse a serialized string into an object (including a string, which is what the article shows).
The class code is brief:
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Xml;
public class ConfigurationTextElement<T> : ConfigurationElement
{
private T _value;
protected override void DeserializeElement(XmlReader reader,
bool serializeCollectionKey)
{
_value = (T)reader.ReadElementContentAs(typeof(T), null);
}
public T Value
{
get { return _value; }
}
}
If you want to be able to have both attributes as well as text content e.g.
<customsection>
<name key="val">My Section</name>
</customSection>
Then you can override DeserializeElement
like so:
protected override void DeserializeElement(XmlReader reader, bool serializeCollectionKey)
{
int count = reader.AttributeCount;
//First get the attributes
string attrName;
for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
{
reader.MoveToAttribute(i);
attrName = reader.Name;
this[attrName] = reader.Value;
}
//then get the text content
reader.MoveToElement();
text = reader.ReadElementContentAsString();
}
Hope this helps.