How to add a xml in web.config?

Question

I have some complex data which is used for application configuration in xml format. I want to keep this xml string in web.config. Is it possible to add a big xml string in w

Answer 1

The configuration sections in web.config support long strings, but the string has to be a single line of text so they can fit into an attribute:

The string also can't contain quotes or line breaks or other XML markup characters. The data is basically XML and it has to be appropriately encoded.

For example, if you have XML like this:

 
   10
 

it would have to be stored in a configuration value like this:

Which kind of defeats the purpose of a configuration element.

You might be better off storing the configuration value in a separate file on the file system and read it from there into a string or XmlDocument etc.