Variables within app.config/web.config

A slightly more complicated, but far more flexible, alternative is to create a class that represents a configuration section. In your app.config / web.config file, you can have this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <!-- This section must be the first section within the <configuration> node -->
    <configSections>
        <section name="DirectoryInfo" type="MyProjectNamespace.DirectoryInfoConfigSection, MyProjectAssemblyName" />
    </configSections>

    <DirectoryInfo>
        <Directory MyBaseDir="C:\MyBase" Dir1="Dir1" Dir2="Dir2" />
    </DirectoryInfo>
</configuration>

Then, in your .NET code (I'll use C# in my example), you can create two classes like this:

using System;
using System.Configuration;

namespace MyProjectNamespace {

    public class DirectoryInfoConfigSection : ConfigurationSection {

        [ConfigurationProperty("Directory")]
        public DirectoryConfigElement Directory {
            get {
                return (DirectoryConfigElement)base["Directory"];
            }
    }

    public class DirectoryConfigElement : ConfigurationElement {

        [ConfigurationProperty("MyBaseDir")]
        public String BaseDirectory {
            get {
                return (String)base["MyBaseDir"];
            }
        }

        [ConfigurationProperty("Dir1")]
        public String Directory1 {
            get {
                return (String)base["Dir1"];
            }
        }

        [ConfigurationProperty("Dir2")]
        public String Directory2 {
            get {
                return (String)base["Dir2"];
            }
        }
        // You can make custom properties to combine your directory names.
        public String Directory1Resolved {
            get {
                return System.IO.Path.Combine(BaseDirectory, Directory1);
            }
        }
    }
}

Finally, in your program code, you can access your app.config variables, using your new classes, in this manner:

DirectoryInfoConfigSection config =
  (DirectoryInfoConfigSection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("DirectoryInfo");
String dir1Path = config.Directory.Directory1Resolved;  // This value will equal "C:\MyBase\Dir1"

Good question.

I don't think there is. I believe it would have been quite well known if there was an easy way, and I see that Microsoft is creating a mechanism in Visual Studio 2010 for deploying different configuration files for deployment and test.

With that said, however; I have found that you in the ConnectionStrings section have a kind of placeholder called "|DataDirectory|". Maybe you could have a look at what's at work there...

Here's a piece from machine.config showing it:

 <connectionStrings>
    <add
        name="LocalSqlServer"
        connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf;User Instance=true"
        providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"
    />
 </connectionStrings>

I thought I just saw this question.

In short, no, there's no variable interpolation within an application configuration.

You have two options

1. You could roll your own to substitute variables at runtime
2. At build time, massage the application configuration to the particular specifics of the target deployment environment. Some details on this at dealing with the configuration-nightmare

Usally, I end up writing a static class with properties to access each of the settings of my web.config.

public static class ConfigManager 
{
    public static string MyBaseDir
    {
        return ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MyBaseDir"].toString();
    }

    public static string Dir1
    {
        return MyBaseDir + ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Dir1"].toString();
    }

}

Usually, I also do type conversions when required in this class. It allows to have a typed access to your config, and if settings change, you can edit them in only one place.

Usually, replacing settings with this class is relatively easy and provides a much greater maintainability.

You have a couple of options. You could do this with a build / deploy step which would process your configuration file replacing your variables with the correct value.

Another option would be to define your own Configuration section which supported this. For example imagine this xml:

<variableAppSettings>
 <variables>
    <add key="@BaseDir" value="c:\Programs\Widget"/>
 </variables>
 <appSettings>
    <add key="PathToDir" value="@BaseDir\Dir1"/>
 </appSettings>
</variableAppSettings>

Now you would implement this using custom configuration objects which would handle replacing the variables for you at runtime.

Inside <appSettings> you can create application keys,

<add key="KeyName" value="Keyvalue"/>

Later on you can access these values using:

ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Keyname"]

I don't think you can declare and use variables to define appSettings keys within a configuration file. I've always managed concatenations in code like you.

I'm struggling a bit with what you want, but you can add an override file to the app settings then have that override file set on a per environment basis.

<appSettings file="..\OverrideSettings.config">

For rolling out products where we need to configure a lot of items with similar values, we use small console apps that read the XML and update based on the parameters passed in. These are then called by the installer after it has asked the user for the required information.