Techniques to access application settings
In every application, you will have at least a few configuration items that you might not want to hardcode. Instead, you may want them to change in the future, after the application goes live, without touching the code.
In general, these configuration items can be classified into two categories:
- Some of the configuration items might be different across environments, for example, the connection strings of the database and the SMTP server.
- Some of them might be the same across environments, such as some constant numbers that are used in some calculations in the code.
Whatever the possible use of the configuration value, you need to have a place to store configuration values that need to be accessed by the application.
In this recipe, we'll learn how and where to store these configuration items and different techniques to access them from your application code.
