I've created some DLLs that use NHibernate, that get loaded and used by 3rd party applications. One of these applications is Visual Studio. What is the recommended way of telling NHibernate where to find the config info, particularly when you do not own the running application? Currently I'm putting config info into the 3rd party app's .exe.config, but that's just a temporary kludge.

In the .exe application configuration file, you could store the path to the session factory configuration file instead of all of the session factory configuration. There is an overload for the Configuration.Configure() method that takes a path to this file.

The format of the file is described in section 3.8 in the documentation: http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/nhibe ... ation.html.

Hmmm... I'll look into that. Still, it doesn't totally avoid having to modify some other app's config file. We might not have permission to modify it at all ...

You don't have to modify the app.config at all, what sguidi suggested was that app.config is a convenient way to store the path to the nhibernate.cfg.xml file. If you don't want to store it in the app.config, store it somewhere else, NHibernate doesn't care.

Let me clarify the question. It's not a problem to come up with a functioning way to locate an Nhibernate.cfg.xml file without assuming it's in the running application's base directory -- the question is, what is a "good" or "recommended" way.

We could kludge something checking an environment variable, but that would be horribly lame and wouldn't support multiple installations of our DLL on the machine at one time. We could check some registry setting, but that means we have to set up a registry key during installation, which we don't want to do either. We could assume it's under Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonApplicationData under a folder with our product's name and version, that might not be so bad ...

Does anyone else have this issue? If so, how are you addressing it?