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Here’s a little idea i just thought out. Using a XML-file as configuration for your application, is not a new thing. But i figured out a nice little idea. What if you want a specific configuration for different user, determined by the users permissions or group membership. A example scenario :

Your application has a lot of users, divided into groups of permissions, lets say administrators, editors and guests. Now you want a specific and a dynamically configuration file. For instance administrators have 2 more pages than the editors.

..

<pageconfiguration >

<page name=”users.aspx” >

<page name=”myaccount.aspx”>

<page name=”comments.aspx”>

</pageconfiguration>

This is a sample configuration file. Lets say you have a pageconfiguration loader, that reads every page-xmlnode. A simple solution too determine if an editor can see users.aspx or not. A not so smart developer wouldt write a bunch of if-else-statements. But what if a customer wants to add a new page to their configuration. The developer has to add another if-else-statement for that page, rebuild application and need to make a new release of the application for that single customer request.

Heres my trick

Loads your pages, via XPath and XML query. Heres my modifed configuration file.

..

<pageconfiguration >

<page name=”users.aspx” usergroups=”adm”>

<page name=”myaccount.aspx” usergroups=”*”>

<page name=”review_comments.aspx” usergroups=”adm,edi”>

</pageconfiguration>

Lets say we call the administrator groups are called adm and the editors are called edi. Administrators pages  can be loaded like this :

XmlDoc.SelectNodes(”/pageconfiguration/page[@ contains(usergroups,"adm") or contains(usergroups,"*")]“);

this will get you all the pages where usergroup contains “adm” and “*”.

Simple, easy and (do i dare) smart.