Vladimir Prus wrote:
Marcin Kalicinski wrote:
Briefly, PO library operates on a flat strings of options, property_tree is a DOM. Think of property_tree like a replacement for Microsoft XML parser, or JSON API, or Windows INI API, or registry API. Do you imagine using program_options to manipulate XML trees, like the ones you get from XML parser? It is not suited for that, its problem domain lies in completely different place, namely parsing a linear string of (command-line) options, possibly supplied as a config file or files.
Well, this is generally wrong. The program_options goal is to obtain named runtime options from whatever source you can store them. I hope to add Win32 Registry or LDAP support in future. Note also that options *are* hierarchical, you can use "your_app.window1.button15.width" as option name, if you're so inclined.
I haven't used program_options yet. But if I understand correctly both libraries seem to support storing and accessing data with strings that might describe some kind of hierarchy. This seems to be the core idea of both libraries - is this correct? Then it wouldn't matter much what container is used. However a generic tree which can store data hierarchically probably makes most sense. If I understand correctly both libraries could make use of such a class? While a generic tree could store any data we would still need something to read data from a XML file, a INI file, the Windows registry, program options etc. to populate a generic tree. How about a hierarchical iterator? Just like stream iterators they could be coupled with a data source. Source code would look somewhat like this: boost::tree t; copy(ihierarchical_xml_iterator<string>("config.xml"), ihierarchical_xml_iterator<string>(), inserter(t)); copy(ihierarchical_ini_iterator<string>("config.ini"), ihierarchical_ini_iterator<string>(), inserter(t)); copy(ihierarchical_registry_iterator<string>("<registry>"), ihierarchical_registry_iterator<string>(), inserter(t)); copy(ihierarchical_options_iterator<string>(argv), ihierarchical_options_iterator<string>(argv + argc), inserter(t)); This should be flexible, extensible and based on existing practices? Boris
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