Creating a generic settings repository in C#

Every project has a group of settings that can be used to configure a web site. Sometimes we store these in the web.config file and sometimes we store them in a database and typically what happens is you create a number of functions to read settings like:

public static string GetSetting_AsString(string settingKey) { /*...*/ }
public static string GetSetting_AsInt(string settingKey) { /*...*/ }
public static string GetSetting_AsBool(string settingKey) { /*...*/ }

This is boring and I finally got sick of copying and pasting all of these functions and decided to start living the Generics dream! With one simple function I have been able to replace all other generic functions with one beautiful one.

And here it is:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;

public static class SettingRepository
{
    public static T GetSetting<T>(string settingKey, T defaultValue )
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(settingKey))
            return defaultValue;

        ProjectEntities dc = new ProjectEntities();
        Setting setting = dc.Settings.Where(s => s.SettingKey == settingKey).FirstOrDefault();

        if (setting == null)
            return defaultValue;

        return (T)Convert.ChangeType(setting.SettingValue, typeof(T));
    }
}

This function gets a setting from a table named Setting in our database.
To retrieve strongly type settings is really easy.

public static void SettingRepositoryTest()
{
    string stringSetting = SettingRepository.GetSetting("stringKey", "Default Value");
    int intSetting = SettingRepository.GetSetting("intKey", 99);
    bool boolSetting = SettingRepository.GetSetting("boolKey", true);
    DateTime dateTimeSetting = SettingRepository.GetSetting("dateTimeKey", DateTime.Now);
}

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Tags: .net, c#, generics