• ASP.NET Core
  • .NET
  • C#

Adding Statically Typed Configuration to ASP.NET Core DI

This is a short and sweet post, it should give you a general idea on how to add typed Configuration/Settings to the .NET Core/ASP.NET Core Dependency Injection container.

Setup

The setup is broken up into 4 files, with minimal necessary logic.

First is the configuration file appsettings.json, the only thing about this is that the object you want to make statically typed needs to be parsed from json and marshalled into a class.

Second is the actual typed representation of the configuration, the TwitchSettings.cs property names correlates to the appsettings.json properties of the Twitch object.

Third is to "Configure" the service layer of the ASP.NET Core application, this happens during startup in Startup.cs. The Configuration.GetSection parameter should point to the "Twitch" section in the appsettings.json file.

And finally to get access to the configuration you can use constructor injection, like so IOptions twitchSettings. This give you access to the configuration, an example can be seen below in BotController.cs.

Example Code

appsettings.json

{
  "Twitch": {
    "Channel": "canhorn",
    "ClientId": "12345",
    "ClientSecret": "<secret>"
  }
}

TwitchSettings.cs

namespace EventHorizon.Platform.Data
{
    public class TwitchSettings
    {
        public string Channel { get; set; } = string.Empty;
        public string ClientId { get; set; } = string.Empty;
        public string ClientSecret { get; set; } = string.Empty;
    }
}

Startup.cs

using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting;
using EventHorizon.Platform.Data;

namespace EventHorizon.Platform
{
    public class Startup
    {
        public IConfiguration Configuration { get; }

        public Startup(IConfiguration configuration)
        {
            Configuration = configuration;
        }

        public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
        {
            // ...
            // Here is the format to get it into the DI container.
            services.Configure<TwitchSettings>(Configuration.GetSection("Twitch"));
        }

        public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
        {
            // ...
        }
    }
}

BotController.cs

using EventHorizon.Platform.Data;

namespace EventHorizon.Plaform.Bot 
{
    public class BotController
    {
        private readonly TwitchSettings _twitchSettings;

        // Here is how to get the value from DI
        public BotController(IOptions<TwitchSettings> twitchSettings)
        {
            _twitchSettings = twitchSettings.Value;
        }
        // ...
    }
}
Cody's logo image, it is an abstract of a black hole with a white Event Horizon.

Cody Merritt Anhorn

A Engineer with a passion for Platform Architecture and Tool Development.