| | 1 | ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// |
| | 2 | // Name: config.h |
| | 3 | // Purpose: topic overview |
| | 4 | // Author: wxWidgets team |
| | 5 | // RCS-ID: $Id$ |
| | 6 | // Licence: wxWindows license |
| | 7 | ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// |
| | 8 | |
| | 9 | /*! |
| | 10 | |
| | 11 | @page overview_config wxConfig classes overview |
| | 12 | |
| | 13 | Classes: #wxConfig |
| | 14 | |
| | 15 | This overview briefly describes what the config classes are and what they are |
| | 16 | for. All the details about how to use them may be found in the description of |
| | 17 | the #wxConfigBase class and the documentation of the |
| | 18 | file, registry and INI file based implementations mentions all the |
| | 19 | features/limitations specific to each one of these versions. |
| | 20 | |
| | 21 | The config classes provide a way to store some application configuration |
| | 22 | information. They were especially designed for this usage and, although may |
| | 23 | probably be used for many other things as well, should be limited to it. It |
| | 24 | means that this information should be: |
| | 25 | |
| | 26 | @li Typed, i.e. strings or numbers for the moment. |
| | 27 | You can not store binary data, for example. |
| | 28 | @li Small. For instance, it is not recommended to use the Windows |
| | 29 | registry for amounts of data more than a couple of kilobytes. |
| | 30 | @li Not performance critical, neither from speed nor from a memory |
| | 31 | consumption point of view. |
| | 32 | |
| | 33 | On the other hand, the features provided make them very useful for storing all |
| | 34 | kinds of small to medium volumes of hierarchically-organized, heterogeneous |
| | 35 | data. In short, this is a place where you can conveniently stuff all your data |
| | 36 | (numbers and strings) organizing it in a tree where you use the |
| | 37 | filesystem-like paths to specify the location of a piece of data. In |
| | 38 | particular, these classes were designed to be as easy to use as possible. |
| | 39 | |
| | 40 | From another point of view, they provide an interface which hides the |
| | 41 | differences between the Windows registry and the standard Unix text format |
| | 42 | configuration files. Other (future) implementations of wxConfigBase might also |
| | 43 | understand GTK resource files or their analogues on the KDE side. |
| | 44 | |
| | 45 | In any case, each implementation of wxConfigBase does its best to |
| | 46 | make the data look the same way everywhere. Due to limitations of the underlying |
| | 47 | physical storage, it may not implement 100% of the base class functionality. |
| | 48 | |
| | 49 | There are groups of entries and the entries themselves. Each entry contains either |
| | 50 | a string or a number (or a boolean value; support for other types of data such as |
| | 51 | dates or timestamps is planned) and is identified by the full path to it: something |
| | 52 | like /MyApp/UserPreferences/Colors/Foreground. |
| | 53 | |
| | 54 | The previous elements in the path are the group names, and each name may |
| | 55 | contain an arbitrary number of entries and subgroups. |
| | 56 | |
| | 57 | The path components are @b always separated with a slash, |
| | 58 | even though some implementations use the backslash internally. Further |
| | 59 | details (including how to read/write these entries) may be found in |
| | 60 | the documentation for #wxConfigBase. |
| | 61 | |
| | 62 | */ |
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