Boost.Dynamic Config

12 Feb 2011

      Hi guys,

I feel as part of the Boost community and having worked on multiple 
platforms that we're missing something to manage reading/writing 
configuration information for an application thread safely across 
platforms.  The best example I know of that handles this job is Qt's 
QSettings which writes to the registry on windows, inis on linux, and some 
sort of xml on Mac OS X.

The inspiration for this comes from the fact that I am looking to build web 
browser plugins that run on multiple platforms.  I started by looking at 
how I could extend boost::program_options, and decided it wasn't the right 
tool because it was primarily for reading configurations, but not really 
writing to them.  Likewise, it doesn't appear to provide anything in terms 
of thread safety.

The interface should model after several things already in existence such 
as: QSettings, std::map, and tbb::concurrent_hash_map.  It should also take 
into consideration how systems such as the Windows Registry works, as well 
as browser specific configuration systems like the one that comes with 
Mozilla Firefox, and of course file based storage.

It should be easily extensible with a simple interface to implement a new 
backend with minimal work.  At a later date, I think it should also be able 
to support things like boost::property_map or boost::fusion to make it easy 
to insert and extract objects from the underlying configuration system with 
automatic type conversion.

I'm not sure how to combine it with boost::fusion or boost::property_map 
yet, so I'm hoping that's where you guys come in.

Thanks,
Dan

Here is a preliminary interface:

namespace boost {
namespace dynamic_config {
    template<typename charT>
     class backend {
      public:
       enum operation_performed {
          none, // e.g. no value changed
          insert,
          update
       };
       bool insert(basic_string<charT> key, (int, basic_string<charT>, 
bool, int64_t, char) value); // These values may be easily implementable 
with boost::variant, or separately if enable_if is used.
       bool update(basic_string<charT> key, (see above..) value);
       // Note this returns operation performed because optional locking 
will be done around these functions, so combining insert with update 
replaces a possible race condition over those 2 operations performed 
separately
       operation_performed replace(basic_string<charT> key, (...) value);
       template <T> bool select(basic_string<charT> key, T& value); // 
returns success if retrieved, this can also use boost::optional otherwise
       bool delete(basic_string<charT> key, bool cascade); // cascade takes 
effect if key takes a whole tree with it
    };

    template <typename charT, typename Backend, typename Mutex>
    class property_config : boost::noncopyable {
      public:
       property_config();
       property_config(basic_string<charT> organizationName, 
basic_string<charT> applicationName); // Pretty much required for use in 
the windows registry and in firefox
       ~property_config();

       size_type erase(basic_string<charT> key);
       void clear();
       template<typename T> bool find(basic_string<charT> key, T & value);
       template<typename T> bool insert(basic_string<charT> key, T value);
       template<typename T> bool update(basic_string<charT> key, T value);
       template<typename T> backend::operation_performed 
replace(basic_string<charT> key, T value);
       template<typename T> bool select(basic_string<charT> key, T& 
value);
       template<typename T> bool delete(basic_string<charT> key,  T& 
value);

    };

    template <typename charT, typename Backend, typename Mutex>
    template <typename T>
    backend::operation_performed property_config<charT, Backend, 
Mutex>::replace(basic_string<charT> key, T val)
    {
        scoped_lock(mutex_);
        backend_.replace(key,val);
    }

}
}

Dan Weber

Mathias Gaunard

Dan Weber

TONGARI

Stewart, Robert

Stewart, Robert

Dan Weber

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