Chapter 19: Question About Web.Config Transforms

ErikWW · February 19th, 2016, 10:00 AM

I have a quick question about web.config transforms as discussed in Chapter 19.

I followed the guidelines in the chapter for my own site (not the Planet Wrox site) and make a publishing profile and a web.config transformation file to modify my connection strings and some other things. It all worked wonderfully, and when I looked in the web.config emitted from the publishing process, the file the changes were all there.

However, I noticed the transformation .config file was emitted into the list of published files as well, and this confused me. In my naive understanding of this process, I was sort of thinking of that file as being something that Visual Studio would use to modify the real web.config file for my published site, but that that file itself wouldn't actually be needed on the production machine.

Obviously it's not a big deal for me to put it on the server too, but it made me worry I didn't fully understand how this transform file worked, and that I had missed something important.

Thanks in advance for any responses.
Erik

Imar · February 19th, 2016, 05:32 PM

Hi Erik,

For Web Site Projects, I don't think there's an easy way to do this. For Web Application Projects you can simply set the build type of a file on its Properties Grid to be excluded, but you have no such option for Web Site Projects.

Cheers,

Imar

ErikWW · February 19th, 2016, 05:39 PM

Thanks.

I was worried that somehow because it was included in the publishing step that it was needed for some reason I didn't quite understand. Sounds like that's simply not true and it's just that VS wasn't smart enough to automatically leave it out of the published files.

Thanks for the reply. And thanks for the great book. I'm learning a lot.

Imar · February 19th, 2016, 05:46 PM

>> and it's just that VS wasn't smart enough to automatically leave it out of the published files.

Yep. Remember that a Web Site Project is "just" a folder, so VS has no way to keep track of which file is relevant / content, and which one is not. With a Web Application Project this is a lot easier.

Cheers,

Imar