What directory is the typical place to save files generated by a program, like a game or tool, when the file itself isn't necessarily useful on it's own? (i.e it's not a "document" like a text file or image that you'd want easy access to, instead it's just a config or save file you'd want to tuck someplace out of the way)
Does this change depending on if a program is "installed", as opposed to an executable free-floating in a folder? (For instance, is it standard practice to just save in the same folder in the latter case?)
If it's someplace that varies, is there a utility function I have to call to get a string of the path?
Check the Known Folder IDs for a tip. Most likely, you want FOLDERID_LocalAppData. Use SHGetKnownFolderPath() to retrieve the folder location.
Usually, I give the users the ability for "install" or "portable", in the latter case the app files goes into a folder under the portable installation folder.
Related
Recently I was trying to put a SQLite database into a QT 5 application I'm writing. I want it to be universally accessible - that is on all systems regardless of where it's installed. I put it as a resource then found out that evidently you can't put databases in resources as the string for the database path passed to setDatabaseName doesn't get translated to the resource system so the database can't be found.
So where can I put it? I don't want to just put it at the root of the drive like C:\repo.db or D:\repo.db as many people hate files cluttering their root directories (like me). I was going to put it just in the source folder and access it as "repo.db" or as I tried "./resources/database/repo.db" but even QFile doesn't see that. Where can I put it and how to access it there? My settings file was going to be in my resources but I wasn't sure if I could update the file then. I need a place that is available from the moment the application is installed on any system including my own so that it can be accessed both while coding it and when it's built.
I'm not asking for opinions - I want a place that is not in the root, somewhere universal like the installation directory (but how do I find that with code?) or a settings directory (but how do I set that somewhere so I can find it later??)
For such purposes Qt provides a list of QStandardPaths functions that return platform specific standard paths, such as a path to desktop, temp directory etc.
For your particular case you might put your database in the directory that corresponds to the QStandardPaths::AppDataLocation key.
You can use QSettings to save path,settings and restore them.
QSettings m_Arhive("Company", "app_name");
//Set DB path
m_Arhive.setValue("DBPath", "c:/somewhere/database");
//Get DB path
m_Arhive.value("DBPath").toString()
Is there any way that I can get modified files/folders after a given timestamp in windows file system? I don't want to traverse entire file system and check which file/folder is modified in my code. Does windows provide any API which returns modified files/folders after a given time stamp ?
No, there is no direct WinAPI to accomplish this.
I'd suggest traversing only through certain folders (exclude folders like Windows, ProgramData) etc. Traverse only through the folders that make sense. ex: Users.
Why? Because the system files in Windows and such folders are accessed very frequently and are modified after system updates. Unless you're keen to see when the system files were modified, I'd say the data is going to be irrelevant and of no meaning.
I created application that store some data to XML file. The issues is with the path of the XML saving. Am using TinyXML to save the data in vc++.
When I deploy this application, it installs in "C:\Program files(x86)\applicationname " and when I run the application the XML file is saving in
"C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\ApplicationName ".
I have made this application to work on system startup. So when I restart this application,
the xml file is stored in different path "C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\windows\sysWOW64"
I want my XML to be stored in the path where I installed or should be stored in appdata, application name
What should I do to store XML file in one places where application is installed?
doc.SaveFile( "test.xml" ); // xml saving code in tinyxml library
Firstly, this has nothing to do with C++, as the C++ code is probably working. Same with XML and tinyxml and even visual-c++.
It seems that windows redirects those write accesses to a user-specific "VirtualStore\Program Files", but I'll leave it to you to research the actual semantics of that. On startup, when there is no user, this path obviously differs, since the former user is not logged in.
Now, in order to get a fixed path, you can use the function GetModuleFileName() to find out the location of your executable and use that path to locate Smartmeter.xml. However, the problem you are facing now is that programs installed under "Program Files" don't magically gain write access rights to their install directory. This is to protect one user from messing with data of another user.
I think that what you are doing is writing a program that runs in the background, which would be called a "service" under MS Windows. What is still unclear is what you want to achieve with this file and also what you are planning to do overall, and these are things that decide the future steps. In any case, take a look at the possibilities that services provide, maybe there is something that fits your needs.
I'm making a simple game with SFML 1.6 in C++. Of course, I have a lot of picture, level, and data files. Problem is, I don't want these files visible. Right now they're just plain picture files in a res/ subdirectory, and I want to either conceal them or encrypt them. Is it possible to put the raw data from the files into a resource file or something? Any solution is okay to me, I just don't want the files exposed to the user.
EDIT
Cross platform solutions best, but if they don't exist, that's okay, I'm working on windows. But I don't really want to use a library if it's not needed.
Most environments come with a resource compiler that converts images/icons/etc into string data and includes them in the source.
Another common technique is to copy them into the end of the final .exe as the last part of the build process. Then at run time, open the .exe as a file and read the data from some determined offset, see Embedding a filesystem in an executable?
The ideal way for this is to make your own archive format, which would contain all of your files' data along with some extra info needed to split files distinctly within it.
I have a class method (implemented in a shared object in UNIX environment) which needs to access a text data file in runtime (using ifstream). Currently the method assumes that the data file is available for opening without any relative path, i.e something like
ifstream dataFile("data.txt");
The shared object is loaded from python code, and in order for it to be available for loading, it is being copied to the \usr\lib\ folder as a post-build step of the makefile. My question is how to make the text data file available for the shared object. I have considered the following possibilities:
Use some relative path, but that method is not totally fool-proof (the project is hosted on various instances and I cannot be sure the directory tree will stay the same (e.g) a month from now).
copy the data file as well to \usr\lib, but I feel this is a wrong attitude.
Any suggestions are welcomed.
The proper way to go about this is to make the location of the text file a configurable value that will be set when your project is installed. Using a configuration file in /etc/ is a common way to store that value.
That way you can put the text file in e.g. /usr/share/ with all the machine-independent files (that data file is machine-independent, right?) and your code would "know" where to find it.
Note that if the data file is going to be modified as part of your code's operation, then it should probably be placed somewhere under /var (/var/lib or perhaps /var/cache) according to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) and most other Unix filesystem standards.
If the data file could be considered a configuration file, as you mentioned in one of your comments, you could just hard-code its path to somewhere under /etc/ (e.g. /etc/MyProject/data.cfg) and go on.
I can think of two solutions :
When you load your shared object, you somehow give it the path to your file.
Instead of copying the file to /usr/lib you could create a symbolic link do it in /usr/lib but that is not the best thing to do imho.
The first solution is the best one for me.