Making a web service reference configuarble - ASP.NET?

Question

We inherited some code that makes use of a web service on an external server from a third party. Currently all the references are done in the project directly and thus compiled to that location and such. This issue we have is that there is a test and production server for the web service with different URLs.

Is there a simple means to make the web reference more dynamic so that it can be defined in a web.config and not require changing the actual source and recompiling to switch between servers?

Answer 1

You could put the url in the appSettings section of the web.config file:

<appSettings>
    <add key="wsUrl" value="http://example.com/staging.asmx" />
</appSettings>

And then read the value and in the constructor of the webservice proxy class and assign it to the Url property:

public SomeProxy()
{
    Url = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["wsUrl"];
}