passing the sharepoint site name - dynamic or in web.config?

Question

i am looking for a way to easily interchangeable the SPSite name and currently i have hard-coded as you can see below... so what is the best way to deal with this issue, i have DEV/QA/PROD box and i should be to change the url without compiling or deploying the SP solution.

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://devserver/sites/test/")) //<<<SPSite name...
       {
            PageViewerWebPart pvwp = new PageViewerWebPart();
            pvwp.Title = "My Page Viewer Web Part";
            pvwp.ContentLink = "http://www.cnn.com";
            this.Controls.Add(pvwp);
        }

Answer 1

Is this a web part that you are re-using across multiple pages and sites? Is this a custom Web Part?

If you are placing this web part on a page in SharePoint, you can use SPContext.Current.Site

using (SPSite mySite = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Site.Url))
{
    ...
} 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spcontext_members.aspx

Edit

A note about the web.config: Every time you update your web.config file, the application pool gets recycled.

Answer 2

If you are developing a custom webpart you can create a webpart property to store the site url which you can use in your code.

Answer 3

I usually do some string manipulation from the HttpContext to get my basepath which I then combine with relative paths in my code.

        if (context.Request.ServerVariables["HTTPS"].ToString().ToUpper().Equals("ON"))
        {
            basepath = "https://";
        }
        else
        {
            basepath = "http://";
        }
        basepath += context.Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_NAME"].ToString();
        if (!context.Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_PORT"].ToString().Equals("80") &&
            !context.Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_PORT"].ToString().Equals("443"))
        {
            basepath += ":" + context.Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_PORT"].ToString();
        }