Important information if you are having a EPiServer site as a Azure Website

One of the great thing that works with Azure website is the availability to set connectionstrings and AppSettings in the config section of the site in Azure Portal. This makes it possible to get away from some config transformation and does so that you do not need to have password in clear text in the web.config.

Sadly this is not working for a EPiServer site I have noticed and now I think I know why. It seems like EPiServer are reading all the settings from a cached version of the web.config file. This cached version are created on initialization of the site and saved in the database in the table tblSiteConfig with the property name WebConfig.

This works great in a normal site but for a Azure website where there are appsettings and connectionstrings defined in config this becomes a problem. The problem is that Azure are updating these settings in runtime so the information in web.config are never changed, it can say whatever as long as the key exists and match the key/name in the config for the site. That means that EPiServer does not know the “real” value and wrongly uses that one in the web.config file and this can be a big problem if you for example think the production site are using a production database because you defined it so in the configuration tab but it is actually using a developer or testdatabase or whatever you have in the web.config file.

An easy way to check this is to temporary update your site with this information. Add this code to for example the controller of the startpage

ViewBag.NetConnectionStrings = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["EPiServerDB"];
ViewBag.EPiServerConnectionString = EPiServerDataStoreSection.ConfigurationInstance.ConnectionStrings.ConnectionStrings["EPiServerDB"];

The first line is how to get a connectionstring “the Microsoft way” and the second line is how to get a connectionstring “the EPiServer way”. Then in the view for the startpage add this:

@if (PageEditing.PageIsInEditMode)
{
    <h3>ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["EPiServerDB"]:</h3>
    <p>@ViewBag.NetConnectionStrings</p>
    <h3>EPiServerDataStoreSection.ConfigurationInstance.ConnectionStrings.ConnectionStrings["EPiServerDB"]:</h3>
    <p>@ViewBag.EPiServerConnectionString</p>
}

The if statement is very important because you do not want to share this information with the whole world

I have reported this as a bug to EPiServer but you can do a workaround until it is done by adding config transformations for this.