[haiku-bugs] [Haiku] #9443: API for unified preference storing
- From: "mks" <trac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:07:59 -0000
#9443: API for unified preference storing
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Reporter: mks | Owner: axeld
Type: enhancement | Status: new
Priority: low | Milestone: R1
Component: Kits/Application Kit | Version:
Keywords: | Blocked By:
Blocking: | Has a Patch: 0
Platform: All |
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Ticket for something I wrote in the forum before, as requested by mmadia,
so I'm quoting myself …
I think application development on Haiku would benefit from a unified and
endorsed way for programmers to save application preferences. That's
something almost every program needs and yet on many platforms there is no
simple API for that. Mac OS X has NSUserDefaults [1] for it and Android
uses SharedPreferences [2]. Systems like GSettings in the Gnome world and
the Windows registry got the premises wrong and are thus not nearly as
comfortable to use.
However, Haiku is "almost there". BMessage can be flattened to and
unflattened from files. The data you can store in a BMessage is sufficient
for almost any kind of preferences and I think I read somewhere that some
programs already use flattened BMessages for that purpose.
What I'd like to see on top of that would be roughly something like a
be_app->GetPreferences(), which would return a BMessage and
be_app->StorePreferences(BMessage). Didn't put too much thought into the
details, but that would be essentially what Android offers. This way the
OS could decide *where* and *how* to store the actual physical data. Which
would mean 2 things: a) application programmers don't need to think about
tedious stuff like storing preferences and can concentrate on more
important things and b) it allows for something like OS X's defaults
system [3].
The important thing here is, that the application does not decide the
where and how, but the OS does, e. g. by using the app signature.
Once applications would use such a system, moving the settings without
breaking app compatibility would be an easy thing to do. If one would
really want to do that. (That was just the point the forum thread was
about)
[1]
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSUserDefaults_Class/Reference/Reference.html
[2]
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/SharedPreferences.html
[3]
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/defaults.1.html
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Ticket URL: <http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/9443>
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