Tag: .NET

This is likely a bit esoteric, but I was setting up an ASP.NET Core 2.2 project recently where I wanted to store logs in MongoDB. I wanted to play with Serilog vs. some of the alternatives. I also wanted to use a configuration file, and I wasn't able to find any good examples online, so I figured I'd create a quick example in this post. This example is applicable to ASP.NET Core 2.2, and may work for other versions, but isn't tested with others.

This seems to be a difficult solution to search for at the moment. The MongoDB .NET driver documentation links to the unit test files on GitHub for examples on aggregation related items, but the links are broken. Looking at the repos on GitHub is useful to find the actual tests, but for the specific problem I was trying to solve, it wasn't entirely helpful.

Basically what I was trying to do would be relatively easy with SQL -- a SELECT DISTINCT from a table/collection based on multiple fields. I really just wanted to get the unique combinations of several fields at the database layer without having to retrieve all the documents from the collection, and then figuring out which were distinct.

This was originally written for .NET Core 2.0, but it should work in newer versions of .NET, and is the equivalent of the old app.config and ConfigurationManager pattern. Below are the steps to set it up.