Larger projects, like Fresh, have a lot of preference settings available to user. An application is supposed to load them on startup, save them on exit, and allow user to change them on runtime.

Usually, Windows application uses registry or .INI file for storing its preferences. User can access them by various dialog boxes.

Usually it is enough to write some code that will load and store all this options one by one. However, for larger applications there should be more sophisticated method. I'm thinking about implementing simple system that will help menaging user settings. It should:

1. Load all preferences from INI file or registry when application starts:

That should be everything that has to be called on startup.

2. Provide routines that will prepare controls in options dialog box:

Where pPref is a pointer to preference structure, and hwnd is a control handle. This function will have to be smart enough to send proper message to a control, for example WM_SETTEXT to editbox, BM_SETCHECK to checkbox.

3. Provide functions that read data from controls when dialog is closed, and store it back in preference structure:

Similar to function above, but works in different direction.

4. Provide access to preferences:

This call should return valid value of given preference, for example pointer to a string or boolean value.

5. Store all preferences when program exists:


Above I mentioned "pPref". It is a pointer to TPreference structure:



There could be static array of TPreference structures that would hold all pref that given application needs.

That's my first draft of this system. Did you ever made anything similar? What do you think of it? How it could be improved? Any comments will be appreciated.

regards,
Mateusz

Please don't go into registry... I hate those apps which i must install and uninstall, just some useless mess. One .INI in program main directory is sufficent. YOu aren't going to do multi-user interface

No I don't want to (at least for Fresh), but it will be easy to extend library so that it will support registry too.

But wouldn't that (storing in the main application dir) require administrator privileges (required to write to c:\program files). Since I work professionally as a sysadmin, that's just asking for bad karma. And since WindowsNT is multi-user (abielt not in the *nix sense), wouldn't it be better to support it from scratch, rather than trying to hack it in later...

Wouldn't it be better to store the *.ini in say: $APPDATA\.app_name\settings.ini

($APPDATA points to the local user directory for storing local settings in files, instead of using the registry. Assuming W2K/XP+)

yeah why don't the application uninstallers properly remove the data from the registry, they never do and you have to use a registry cleaner :\

.ini is much easier to edit manually, and once you know where Fresh is, you can already find the .ini file.. Not so with Registry (I hate all the mess in my Registry!)

OK, but what about whole idea? what do you think?

I think it can be nicely done via xml. I once thought about writing some xml-parsing code, but have lack of time recently. Even though my imagination of this: Any preference can be matched by id or by name.