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I've not done much coding for Windows lately, and I find myself sitting at Visual Studio right now, making a small program for Windows 7 in C++. I need some configuration data to be read/written.

In the old days, (being a Borland kind of guy) I'd just use a TIniFile and keep the .ini beside my exe Obviously this is just not the done thing any more. The MS docs tell me that Get/WritePrivateProfileString are for compatibility only, and I doubt that I'd get away with writing to Program Files these days. Gosh I feel old.

I'd like the resulting file to be easily editable - open in notepad sort of thing, and easily findable. This is a small app, I don't want to have to write a setup screen when I can just edit the config file.

So, what is the modern way of doing this?

pictiPig
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2 Answers2

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Often people use XML files for storing preferences, but they are often overkill (and they aren't actually all that readable for humans).

If your needs would be easily satisfied with an INI file, you may want to use Boost.Program_options using the configuration file parser backend, which actually writes INI-like files without going through deprecated (and slow!) APIs, while exposing a nice C++ interface.

The key thing to get right is where to write such configuration file. The right place is usually a subdirectory (named e.g. as your application) of the user's application data directory; please, please, please, don't harcode its path in your executable, I've seen enough broken apps failing to understand that the user profile may not be in c:\Documents and settings\Username.

Instead, you can retrieve the application data path using the SHGetFolderPath function with CSIDL_APPDATA (or SHGetKnownFolderPath with FOLDERID_RoamingAppData if you don't mind to lose the compatibility with pre-Vista Windows versions, or even just expanding the %APPDATA% environment variable).

In this way, each user will be able to store its preferences and you won't get any security-related errors when writing your preferences.

Matteo Italia
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  • Another option is to let the user choose where to store the configuration file. Then you can save that location in the registry. If you're not the only user of the program, this may help them find the config file to edit. Content itself can still be an ini file. The _modern way_ would probably be to write the config screen and store it in the Windows registry. – Matthijs Bierman Feb 19 '11 at 15:56
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    Thanks for that - the boost link looks like what I was after. I remember SHGetFolderPath from back when - I did most of my windows coding during the dos -> win3.1 -> windows 95 era and suffered greatly from hardcoding things. – pictiPig Feb 19 '11 at 17:46
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This is my opinion (which I think most of the answers you get will be opinion), but it seems that the standard way of doing things these days is to store config files like these in C:\Users\<Username>. Moreover, it is generally good to not clutter this directory itself, but to use a subdirectory for the purpose of storing your application's data, such as C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\<YourApplicationName>. It might be overkill for a single config file, but that will give you the opportunity to have all of your application data in one place, should you add even more.

irritate
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    The path I suggest is %APPDATA%, but as Matteo has answered, you should get it dynamically and not hardcode it. – irritate Feb 19 '11 at 15:45