Hi everyone, I'm looking to get involved in Sword development, and Troy has asked me to look at some changes to the SWConfig module. I have drawn up a brief specification of proposed changes, and I ask interested parties to peruse the specification and provide comments and feedback.
Current Behavior - The SWConfig class will read in configuration information from a file, the filename being given in the SWConfig constructor, and exhibit the semantics of a map of maps, that is, a map of sections to maps of name/value pairs. - The SWConfig class has a Save method which will serialize the information back to the configuration file - Information from multiple SWConfig instances can be combined into one using the += operator - Limitation: although multiple SWConfig instances can be combined easily, using +=, there is no way to serialize a modified SWConfig instance to the files it was originally made up of. Proposed Changed - An additional constructor for SWConfig should be provided which takes a sequence of configuration files, which are all loaded and combined - A method should be provided which allows loading of a configuration file and merging its contents with the current configuration information - When the Save method is called, each section is serialized to the file it originally came from - If a section exists in multiple files, then only those names which came from that file are serialized to the file. - If a name/value pair has been added since the files were loaded, then that name/value pair is serialized to all files which contain the relevant section. [1] - When loading multiple files, if different files have the same name but different values, for the same section, then both name/value pairs will be loaded. If they have the same name and the same value, then only one of the copies will be loaded. [1] an alternative scheme could see it only being serialized to one of the files; perhaps the first file in the list, or an implementation-chosen file. I hope this makes sense :) Some additional changes I might make: - remove use of strtok(). strtok() is a non-reentrant function (not to mention not thread safe), which is potentially dangerous, especially for a library to use. Could be replaced by strtok_r(), or hand-coded parsing (since the parsing is not complicated) - get rid of using namespace std; in the header file. Just because people want to use Sword doesn't necessarily mean they want 1000+ symbols imported into the global namespace :) - make multimapwithdefault more efficient by caching iterators - remove non-private member variables from the SWConfig - modify the code to handle arbitrary line-lengths. Any comments on these suggested changes are welcome. God Bless, -David.
