Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
All of above could (should?) be implemented more conviniently using Serialization Library. I believe program runtime parameters support has different goals and rationale. If you need bidirectional permanent store for some application state data - use serilization lib. If you need to read configuration from different sources and potencially only part of it - you need different solution. The difference is that in first case there is a direct correspondance between data in permanane storage and it's presentation at runtime within application (hence bidirectional). In later case I may have parametes comming from different sources conflict with each other and I may want ot use only 1 in 1000 of them. And this is runtime parameters domain. Intended to be covered by PO library (failed IMO, but again that's a different story)
We do use serialization for this currently to XML values, but not all the values in our config files are available via the UI because under normal circumstances, they don't need to be tweaked, but we still need access to them at some point. Therefore if the config file is human read-able, these can be tweaked without need for extra UI. We currently use XML archives with serialization for this, but because of class/type ids etc and other info serialization squirts out, this files can easily be screwed up. This solution seems much neater to me. Cheers Russell