Skip to main content

Use Azure App Configuration To Store Hierarchical Data

.NET Core has first class support for parsing hierarchical configuration data. If you have a JSON configuration like this, 

{
"rootObject": [
{
"level1": "l1v1",
"level2": "l1v2"
},
{
"level1": "l2v1",
"level2": "l2v2"
}
]
}

then you can easily target individual values with "rootObject:[0]:level1". However to store this JSON, you have to either use a File System or some kind of database. The problem with this approach is that you have to modify the entire document when you want to change a value of any field. If you are not careful, you may end up corrupting the JSON and thus breaking your system.

This is where Azure App Configuration comes in the picture. Azure App Configuration is nothing but a key-value store. We can use that to store the hierarchical values like this:


Once you inject this Azure App Configuration in your .NET Core project and call Configuration.Bind() on your strongly typed representation of the JSON configuration, you get the fully populated .NET Object without writing a single line of code!


Hope this post helps you in making a decision on where and how to store your hierarchical configuration data for .NET apps.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

As far as possible, please refrain from posting Anonymous comments. I would really love to know who is interested in my blog! Also check out the FAQs section for the comment policy followed on this site.

Popular posts from this blog

Integrating React with SonarQube using Azure DevOps Pipelines

In the world of automation, code quality is of paramount importance. SonarQube and Azure DevOps are two tools which solve this problem in a continuous and automated way. They play well for a majority of languages and frameworks. However, to make the integration work for React applications still remains a challenge. In this post we will explore how we can integrate a React application to SonarQube using Azure DevOps pipelines to continuously build and assess code quality. Creating the React Application Let's start at the beginning. We will use npx to create a Typescript based React app. Why Typescript? I find it easier to work and more maintainable owing to its strongly-typed behavior. You can very well follow this guide for jsx based applications too. We will use the fantastic Create-React-App (CRA) tool to create a React application called ' sonar-azuredevops-app '. > npx create-react-app sonar-azuredevops-app --template typescript Once the project creation is done, we ...
1 comment
Continue Reading >>

Centralized Configuration for .NET Core using Azure Cosmos DB and Narad

We are living in a micro services world. All these services are generally hosted in Docker container which are ephemeral. Moreover these service need to start themselves up, talk to each other, etc. All this needs configuration and there are many commercially available configuration providers like Spring Cloud Config Server, Consul etc. These are excellent tools which provide a lot more functionality than just storing configuration data. However all these have a weakness - they have a single point of failure - their storage mechanism be it a file system, database etc. There are ways to work around those but if you want a really simple place to store configuration values and at the same time make it highly available, with guaranteed global availability and millisecond reads, what can be a better tool than Azure Cosmos DB! So I set forth on this journey for ASP.NET Core projects to talk to Cosmos DB to retrieve their configuration data. For inspiration I looked at Steeltoe Con...
4 comments
Continue Reading >>

Add Git Commit Hash and Build Number to a Static React Website using Azure DevOps

While working on a React based static website recently, there was a need to see exactly what was deployed in the Dev/Test environments to reduce confusion amongst teams. I wanted to show something like this: A quick look at the site's footer should show the Git Commit Hash and Build Number which was deployed and click through to actual commits and build results. Let's see how we achieved this using Azure DevOps. Git Commit Hash Azure DevOps exposes a variable called  $(Build.SourceVersion) which contains the hash of the commit. So I defined a variable in the Build Pipeline using it. Build Id and Build Number Azure DevOps also exposes two release time variables  $(Build.BuildId) and  $(Build.BuildNumber) which can be used to define custom variables in the pipeline. So we have a total of 3 variables defined: Next we use these variables in our React App. I created 3 global variables in index.html and assigned a token value to them. < script   type = "text/JavaScri...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading >>