Ability to use AutoConfig.Map on things that aren't on disk

[herebebeasties]

We'd like to be able to compose this library's awesome config deserialization code with things that aren't on disk (our existing config library supports loading config from a file system abstraction library for in-memory testing and long-path support).

Your public API currently requires that we write the content out to disk so it can be loaded in by the library (your public API optionally takes a configFilePath). Would you consider adding an overload to AutoConfig.Map that takes a Stream or a TextReader, or alternatively making the internal method that takes an XElement public?

Thanks for the good work on this library!

[edpollitt]

Hi, thanks for the comments. Can you clarify, are you looking to pass in the complete fully formed configuration file/section or are you dealing only with the specific XElement snippet corresponding to the requested type? Note that the specific section has already been extracted by the time the internal Map method is hit.

[herebebeasties]

Preferably I'd pass in the entire raw "file" via a Stream.

My issue is that there is no entry-point to this library that doesn't involve stuff on actual disk. If you want to unit test your config loading or insert it into the middle of other code that uses a file system abstraction library for testability, you are high and dry right now. This is preventing us from adopting this. :-(

[0xced]

Unfortunately, I think it may be impossible to implement reading from Stream because of how the configuration system is designed, see Load configuration file from stream instead of file on Stack Overflow.