docs/doxygen/overviews/config.h

   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: wxConfigBase
  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 @c /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 */