added images for topic overviews

[wxWidgets.git] / docs / doxygen / overviews / config.h

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// Name:        config.h
// Purpose:     topic overview
// Author:      wxWidgets team
// RCS-ID:      $Id$
// Licence:     wxWindows license
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/*!

 @page overview_config wxConfig classes overview

 Classes: #wxConfig

 This overview briefly describes what the config classes are and what they are
 for. All the details about how to use them may be found in the description of
 the #wxConfigBase class and the documentation of the
 file, registry and INI file based implementations mentions all the
 features/limitations specific to each one of these versions.

 The config classes provide a way to store some application configuration
 information. They were especially designed for this usage and, although may
 probably be used for many other things as well, should be limited to it. It
 means that this information should be:

 @li Typed, i.e. strings or numbers for the moment. 
     You can not store binary data, for example.
 @li Small. For instance, it is not recommended to use the Windows
     registry for amounts of data more than a couple of kilobytes.
 @li Not performance critical, neither from speed nor from a memory
     consumption point of view.

 On the other hand, the features provided make them very useful for storing all
 kinds of small to medium volumes of hierarchically-organized, heterogeneous
 data. In short, this is a place where you can conveniently stuff all your data
 (numbers and strings) organizing it in a tree where you use the
 filesystem-like paths to specify the location of a piece of data. In
 particular, these classes were designed to be as easy to use as possible.

 From another point of view, they provide an interface which hides the
 differences between the Windows registry and the standard Unix text format
 configuration files. Other (future) implementations of wxConfigBase might also
 understand GTK resource files or their analogues on the KDE side.

 In any case, each implementation of wxConfigBase does its best to
 make the data look the same way everywhere. Due to limitations of the underlying
 physical storage, it may not implement 100% of the base class functionality.

 There are groups of entries and the entries themselves. Each entry contains either 
 a string or a number (or a boolean value; support for other types of data such as  
 dates or timestamps is planned) and is identified by the full path to it: something
 like /MyApp/UserPreferences/Colors/Foreground. 

 The previous elements in the path are the group names, and each name may 
 contain an arbitrary number of entries and subgroups.

 The path components are @b always separated with a slash,
 even though some implementations use the backslash internally. Further
 details (including how to read/write these entries) may be found in
 the documentation for #wxConfigBase.

*/