Dynamically updating config (for extensions in my case)

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I’d like to be able to update the configuration of application insights after it has already been initialized. I’ve wrapped the package in an Angular Library using APP_INITIALIZER so using ai is much more straight forward for my team. The only issue is that something like the Angular plugin requires to run an init step. Not really compatible with passing config using forRoot({...})

Describe the solution you’d like I’d like to be able to do something like

addExtension(extension: ITelemetryPlugin, config?: { [extKey: string]: { [configKey: string]: any } }): void {
        const extensions = [...this.config.extensions, extension];
        this.config = { ...this.config, extensions };

        let extensionConfig = this.config.extensionConfig;
        if (config) {
            extensionConfig = { ...extensionConfig, config };
        }

        this.appInsights = new ApplicationInsights({
            config: this.config
        });
        this.appInsights.reLoadAppInsights();  // <--- new function to update config
    }

Running the above code of course errors out with

ERROR Error: Core should not be initialized more than once

[MSNev]

Hi @mikecabana, yes 100% agree, this is one of the enhancements that we will be looking at creating next year (based on current planning). It may not be exactly as you have described, but the high level design is

• Enable updating / reconfiguring of plugins (and core) after initialization
• As part of this Investigate potential for dynamically (late loading) of additional plugins after initialization (ideally, this will get included, but needs to be investigated first)

We can’t commit to a timeframe just yet as there are some other largish features ahead of this work and this has implications on minification / tree shaking efforts (i.e. it’s going to add more code)

[MSNev]

An update on progress, we originally intended to deliver this as part of the next release v2.8.0 but because of the size of the changes required the next release will only partial support this.

Simplistically, v2.8.0 is going to support completely unloading and re-initializing the SDK (not ideal but a start) and we are planning that the next major release (v3.0.0) will include full support to dynamically update the config on the fly.

Timeline wise apart from bug fixes to the 2.8.0 lineage 3.x will be the next release that we will start working on (initially in the beta branch).

One other planned change to 3.x is that we are currently intending to drop ES3 (IE8) support.