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 licence
   7 /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
   8
   9 /**
  10
  11 @page overview_config wxConfig 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 file, registry and INI file
  18 based implementations mentions all the features/limitations specific to each
  19 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. You cannot store binary
  27     data, for example.
  28 @li Small. For instance, it is not recommended to use the Windows registry for
  29     amounts of data more than a couple of kilobytes.
  30 @li Not performance critical, neither from speed nor from a memory consumption
  31     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 filesystem-like
  37 paths to specify the location of a piece of data. In particular, these classes
  38 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 make the data
  46 look the same way everywhere. Due to limitations of the underlying physical
  47 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
  50 either a string or a number (or a boolean value; support for other types of
  51 data such as dates or timestamps is planned) and is identified by the full path
  52 to it: something 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 @e always separated with a slash, even though some
  58 implementations use the backslash internally. Further details (including how to
  59 read/write these entries) may be found in the documentation for wxConfigBase.
  60
  61 */
  62