ASP.NET IConfigurationSection is returning null objects for POCO

Question

I looked through various solutions posted on StackOverflow -- many were outdated. The intent is to use IConfigurationSection.Get to return a POCO object from a json section via JsonConfigurationExtensions.

The simplest case:

IConfigurationBuilder builder = new ConfigurationBuilder()
    .AddJsonFile("appsettings.json", optional: true, reloadOnChange: true)
    .AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{hostEnvironment.EnvironmentName}.json", optional: true)
    .AddEnvironmentVariables();
IConfiguration configuration = builder.Build();
return configuration.GetSection("ServerConfiguration").Get<ServerConfiguration>();

And a nested POCO:

public class ServerConfiguration
{
    public Authentication Authentication { get; internal set; }
}

public class Authentication
{
   public DatabaseConfiguration UserDatabase { get; internal set; }
}

public class DatabaseConfiguration
{
    public string ConnectionString { get; internal set; }

    public string DatabaseName { get; internal set; }
}

The result is a null object.

In order to "clean up" my code at inception, I actually did not include the set property declarations as it wasn't needed in previous Json to POCO handlers. However, even when declaring these handlers (typically non-public) the ASP.NET implementation for Json file processing was always returning null although retrieving the individual key pairs from the section was successful.

Bryan · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-29 05:38:38Z

2

The answer was buried in a response in the ASP.NET forum: https://github.com/aspnet/Configuration/issues/394#issuecomment-444683884

The resulting change in the code:

1) Make sure there is a declaration of a set handler (internal, protected, private).
2) Specify BindOptions => BindNonPublicProperties.

return configuration.GetSection("ServerConfiguration")
           .Get<ServerConfiguration>(c => c.BindNonPublicProperties = true);

answered Dec 29, 2019 at 5:38

Bryan

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