# Sunday, June 15, 2008
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With as many new modules as I've created for my web sites and shared between them all, I've developed a need for custom sections in my web configs.  That way it's easy to copy and paste setting for a component into a new (or existing) project and not worry about overlapping (i.e to config elements with the same name).  I've been doing this for a long time but it always took me 4 or 5 lines of code to access the values in the elements.

Here some example web.config code:

<configuration>

   <configSections>

      <section name="RSS" type="System.Configuration.DictionarySectionHandler, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/>

   </configSections>

   <RSS>

      <add key="ContentType" value="text/xml"/>

      <add key="Title" value="Site Construx's Article RSS Feed"/>

   </RSS>

</configuration> 

 

Here's how to access the custom config element with a single line of code

	(string)((Hashtable)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("RSS"))["Generator"];

If you're having trouble with this feel free to post a comment and I'll help you out!