Using arrays of objects in AppService configurations

Oooh my beloved configs…this may sound trivial but I lost quite a bit of time today with it so here it is to avoid you doing the same.

The baseline here is that we’re working with a dotnet web API deployed to the AppService

Let’s say that you have some configuration in your Visual Studio secrets that contains an array of objects. In my case the array defines all the authorities that some Microsoft Graph client I have can login to:

"MicrosoftGraph": {
    "Authorities": [
      {
        "Name" :  "default",
        "Identifier": "UnderMySkin"
      },
      {
        "Name": "BlackStar",
        "Identifier": "GoodbyeLullaby"
      }
    ],
    "ClientId": "LetGo",
    "ClientSecret": "TheBestDamnThing"
  },

Inside the C# project this config maps to an IEnumerable<Authorities> without any problems but-how-da-fuq-in-thiz-life can we define that in the Configuration blade of the AppService?

As you probably already know, JSON “hierarchy” in AppService settings is defined using double under-scores: ‘__’ so…to define elements of an array or list we just use number indexes starting at 0:

MicrosoftGraph__Authorities__0__Name => default MicrosoftGraph__Authorities__0__Identifier => UnderMySkin MicrosoftGraph__Authorities__1__Name => BlackStar MicrosoftGraph__Authorities__1__Identifier => GoodbyeLullaby

Screenshot from the Azure portal: