Modifying the web.config during the installation of a Web Setup Project

Question

I have WCF web service project, inside my web.config I have a name value section where I define some values needed for my service.

    <section name="complianceModuleSettings" type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler" />

  <complianceModuleSettings>
    <add key="pyLibRoot" value="somevalue"/>
    <add key="complianceModuleRoot" value="somevalue" />
  </complianceModuleSettings>

My service needs to be installed via a Windows Installer so I have created a Web Setup Project. This works great for installing my service. However I have run into an issue where I want to add a step to the user interface to prompt them to enter a value that I want to use to overwrite this key value pair in my web.config. The reason for this is becuase I don't want to have the person installing the service have to go in after the web service has been installed and modify the web.config by hand.

I have used Set Up Projects before for installing Windows Services and have added new user interface steps and taken those values and passed them to the installer of the windows service intsaller via the custom actions. Is there something similar I can do to take the user entered values and use them to modify the web.config?

Thanks

Victor

System: Visual Studio 2008 Team System sp2

Answer 1

Hi Vicb,

For your scenario, I think you will still need to follow the "Custom Action" approach(for vs setup project). Here are some reference on this:

#Modify Connection string in Web.config during installation
http://forums.asp.net/t/1396512.aspx

#Walkthrough: Redirecting an Application to Target a Different XML Web Service at Installation 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5k10s063(VS.80).aspx

Also, since this is a pure VS setup issue, I would suggest you post the question in setup forum so as to get more ideas on this:

http://forums.asp.net/17.aspx

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