Handling unknown elements with a ConfigurationElement

microsoft.public.dotnet.framework

16 Nov 2006 7:25 PM

dennis.doomen

Hi,

Since the IConfigurationSectionHandler interface has been deprecated
since the introduction of .NET 2.0, I'm trying to use the new
configuration classes to handle a custom configuration section. I've
gone through all the samples and MSDN docs, but none of them answer my
question. What is specific (I think) is that I want to have a child
element that is not known until runtime:

    <processingService>
      <processes>
        <process name="Process1" type="SomeNamespace.Process1,
SomeAssembly">
          ....elements specific to the Process1 class
        </process>
        <process name="Process2" type="SomeNamespace.Process2,
SomeAssembly">
          ....elements specific to the Process2 class
       </process>
      </processes>
    </processingService>

Essentially, I want to allow each <process> element to have some child
elements only known by the class that it refers to (e.g. Process1).
I've defined the ConfigurationSection, ConfigurationElementCollection,
ConfigurationElements and ConfigurationProperties as it should, and
everything works fine until I add some arbitrary child elements. The
configuration framework then throws an exception resulting from the
unrecognized elements.

As a workaround, I can prevent that exception by overriding the
OnDeserializeUnrecognizedElement method of the ConfigurationElement
that represents the <process> element. I can even extract the child XML
and store it somewhere. But with that, I want to be able to deserialize
that XML to a ConfigurationElement subclass provided by the ProcessX
class (because they are the only ones who should know what that XML
means). Unfortunately, there is no method or interface I can find to
manually serialize some XML to a ConfigurationElement subclass.

Question 1: What is the preferred way of dealing with unknown child
elements in .NET 2.0?
Question 2: How can I programmatically (de)serialize XML to/from a
ConfigurationElement subclass which has properties that have
[ConfigurationProperty] attributes on them.