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	1	\section{wxConfig classes overview}\label{wxconfigoverview}
	2
	3	Classes: \helpref{wxConfig}{wxconfigbase}
	4
	5	This overview briefly describes what the config classes are and what they are
	6	for. All the details about how to use them may be found in the description of
	7	the \helpref{wxConfigBase}{wxconfigbase} class and the documentation of the
	8	file, registry and INI file based implementations mentions all the
	9	features/limitations specific to each one of these versions.
	10
	11	The config classes provide a way to store some application configuration
	12	information. They were especially designed for this usage and, although may
	13	probably be used for many other things as well, should be limited to it. It
	14	means that this information should be:
	15
	16	\begin{enumerate}\itemsep=0pt
	17	\item Typed, i.e. strings or numbers for the moment. You can not store
	18	binary data, for example.
	19	\item Small. For instance, it is not recommended to use the Windows
	20	registry for amounts of data more than a couple of kilobytes.
	21	\item Not performance critical, neither from speed nor from a memory
	22	consumption point of view.
	23	\end{enumerate}
	24
	25	On the other hand, the features provided make them very useful for storing all
	26	kinds of small to medium volumes of hierarchically-organized, heterogeneous
	27	data. In short, this is a place where you can conveniently stuff all your data
	28	(numbers and strings) organizing it in a tree where you use the
	29	filesystem-like paths to specify the location of a piece of data. In
	30	particular, these classes were designed to be as easy to use as possible.
	31
	32	From another point of view, they provide an interface which hides the
	33	differences between the Windows registry and the standard Unix text format
	34	configuration files. Other (future) implementations of wxConfigBase might also
	35	understand GTK resource files or their analogues on the KDE side.
	36
	37	In any case, each implementation of wxConfigBase does its best to
	38	make the data look the same way everywhere. Due to limitations of the underlying
	39	physical storage, it may not implement 100\% of the base class functionality.
	40
	41	There are groups of entries and the entries themselves. Each entry contains either a string or a number
	42	(or a boolean value; support for other types of data such as dates or
	43	timestamps is planned) and is identified by the full path to it: something
	44	like /MyApp/UserPreferences/Colors/Foreground. The previous elements in the
	45	path are the group names, and each name may contain an arbitrary number of entries
	46	and subgroups. The path components are {\bf always} separated with a slash,
	47	even though some implementations use the backslash internally. Further
	48	details (including how to read/write these entries) may be found in
	49	the documentation for \helpref{wxConfigBase}{wxconfigbase}.
	50