CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.netarchitecture
VJOY
VJOY

Reputation: 3792

Web application configuration settings - Which is the better place to store



I came across a case study few days early. It is related to a web application architecture.
Here is the scenario,
There is a single web service used by say 1000 web applications. This web service is hosted on a particular server. If web service hosting location is changed, how the other applications come to know about this change ?
Keeping it in web.config doesn't seems to be a feasible solution as we need to modify web.config files for all the applications.
Keeping these settings in a common repository and let all the applications use it for web-service address was came in my mind, but again there is a question of storing this common repository.

I am just curious to know about how this could be achieved with better performance.
Thanks in advance for any kind of suggestions.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 200

Answers (1)

Davide Piras
Davide Piras

Reputation: 44605

do you have full access or control over all those web applications consuming that web service? if so, you could have a script or some custom code which updates all their web.config(s) at once. it seems too much work but in fact in this way you have more control and you could also, eventually, point to the new url only some applications and leave some others on another url.

the idea with the setting in a centralized database gives you faster update propagation which could also be bad in case of errors and then you have all applications referring to the same place and no way to split this. Then you have anyway to connect to a centralized database from all of them and maybe you should add a key to their web.config(s) with the connection string to that database, then, in case that database is not reachable or is down, the web applications will not be able to consume the web service simply because they cannot get the url of it.

I would go for the web config, eventually you could have a settings helper class that abstract the retrieval of that url so the UI or front end does not know from where that url comes from.

anyway, do you plan to change the url of a web service often? wouldn't be better to copy it to a new url but to also keep it available on the current url for a while?

another advantage of web.config approach is that everytime you update and save it the application is restarted while a change in a database might take a while to be detected in case you have some caching mechanism,

hope this helps.

Davide.

Upvotes: 1

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