I am trying to put some mapping config represented in json:
[{"Name":"xyz","Ids":["456f782d468","c65b4703"]},{"Name":"abc","Ids":["a95fg567","456sdf564"]}]
Is it possible to store a json in appsettings?
I know I can create a custom section in web.config.
But this app may be deployed to Azure Web Apps where appsettings is the only way I see this config can go.
Not nicely. The web.config is XML and quotes are not allowed in XML without escaping them to ". Doing that on a JSON still will make it "difficult" to read / maintain. Base64 that serhiyb is one solution, but that will not be maintainable by a person either.
I'd store them as appsettings key/value pairs and then generate the json string at runtime.
If you are 100% the string will never change, then escaping or Base64 is an option.
With your limitations I would just encode it to Base64 string and decode it back when you read it from web.config.
If you use " instead of quote characters then you can store JSON in app settings or connection strings without issues in the Web.config. E.g.:
<add key="ThisIsJson" value="[{"Name":"xyz"}]"/>
This doesn't need any special processing either, at least with Json.NET.
In my web.config, brackets are for using variable like {0} or {1}. So, I need to escape them with double brackets like that:
<add key="ThisIsJson" value="{{"Name":"xyz"}}"/>
Hope it will help.
I used single quotes to store serialized model in the config, then simply deserialized it after reading it from config.
var serialized = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(yourObject);
var configFriendlyString = serialized.Replace("\"", "'"); // store it in config file
var deserialized = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<YourObjectModel>(configFriendlyString);
Example of how the serialized object looks in the config:
<add key="Categories" value="[{'ID':1,'Name':'All'},{'ID':2,'Name':'Review'}]" />
This way it's easily readable and editable. Note that JsonConvert can deserialize it without need of replacing single quotes back with double quotes.
{ "sometext": "It's not going to work" })