I was looking for a solution to store program settings or options or configuration in C++. These could be settings that are exposed in a GUI and need to be saved between runs of my code.
In my search I came across boost.PropertyTree which seemed to be a good choice. I know boost is well respected code so I'm comfortable using it and so I started developing using this. Then I come across boost.program_options which seems to allow you to do the same thing but also looks more specialized for the specific use-case of program settings.
Now I'm wondering which is the most appropriate for the job? (or is there a 3rd option that is better than both)
EDIT:
fyi this is for a plugin so it will not use command line options (as in, it's not even possible).
UPDATE
I ended up sticking with boost.PropertyTree. I needed to be able to save changed options back to the INI, and I didn't see a way of doing that with boost.program_options.
Use boost::program_options. It's exactly what it's for. In one library you get command line options, environment variables options and an INI-like configuration file parser. And they're all integrated together in the Right way, so when then the user specifies the same option in more than one of these sources the library knows the Right priority order to consider.
boost::property_tree on the other hand is a more generalized library. The library parses the text stream into a uniform data model. But You need to do the real parsing -- that of making sense of the blob of data for your needs. The library doesn't know when to expect a parameter when it sees a particular option string, or to disallow specific values or types of values for a particular option.
After some digging around I think boost.PropertyTree is still the best solution because it gives me the capability to save the options after changing them from within the program which is a requirement.
There is a non-Boost possibility too. Config4Cpp is a robust, simple-to-use and comprehensively documented configuration-file parser library that I wrote. It is available at www.config4star.org.
I suggest you read Chapter 3 (Preferences for a GUI Application) of the Practical Usage Guide manual to read an overview of how Config4Cpp can do what you want. Then open the Getting Started Guide manual, and skim-read Chapters 2 and 3, and Section 7.4 (you might prefer to read the PDF version of that manual). Doing that should give you sufficient details to help you decide if Config4Cpp suits your needs better or worse than Boost.
By the way, the indicated chapters and sections of documentation are short, so they shouldn't take long to read.
Related
Basically, I want to be to be able to pass data between Excel cells and
my C++ program. I don't have any experience in Excel/C++ interactions and I haven't been able to find a coherent explanation or documentation on any websites. If someone could link me some references or provide one themselves it would be much appreciated. Thanks.
If this is for a Windows system, you could always use one of the available managed Excel libraries, such as OfficeWriter or Aspose.
There also might be similar libraries specifically for c++, I know we (OfficeWriter) used to make one.
Edit: Looks like there are a few out there, like LibXL and BasicExcel.
If the application will run on an end user machine with Excel installed, you can easily use the Excel interop and keep Excel hidden.
In addition to LibXL and BasicExcel mentioned by smoore, there is:
ExcelFormat Library is an improved version of the BasicExcel library and will allow you to read and write simple values. It is free.
xlslib will also read and write simple values, I have not tried it tho. It is also free.
Number Duck, is a commercial library that I have written, It supports reading and writing values, formulas and pictures. The website has examples of how to use the features.
Are there any C/C++ libraries available that can be used in creating, loading and saving files in .odt-format?
Alternatively, where can I find tutorial-like information on implementing .odt(/ODF) specifications?
This site: OASIS OpenDocument Essentials seems to cover the problem, including howto-examples and shortcuts.It's quite nicely done and easy to follow.
Flexibility can be perceived as complexity. If you don't need the
flexibility, create a template ODT and just fill in the content as
needed. As mentioned, there exist XML parsers to actually handle IO.
ODT isn't a plaintext file, so some complexity/difficulty is expected.
– Ioan
From the link:
The Virtues of Cheating
As you begin to work with OpenDocument files, you may want to write a
program that constructs a document with some feature that isn’t
explained in this book—this is, after all, an “essentials” book. Just
start OpenOffice.org or KOffice, create a document that has the
feature you want, unpack the file, and look for the XML that
implements it. To get a better understanding of how things works,
change the XML, repack the document, and reload it. Once you know how
a feature works, don’t hesitate to copy and paste the XML from the
OpenDocument file into your program. In other words, cheat. It worked
for me when I was writing this book, and it can work for you too!
Is there a tool that generates C/C++ source code from XML (or something similar) to create command line argument parsing functionality?
Now a longer explanation of the question:
I have up til now used gengetopt for command line argument parsing. It is a nice tool that generates C source code from its own configuration format (a text file). For instance the gengetopt configuration line
option "max-threads" m "max number of threads" int default="1" optional
among other things generates a variable
int max_threads_arg;
that I later can use.
But gengetopt doesn't provide me with this functionality:
A way to generate Unix man pages from the gengetopt configuration format
A way to generate DocBook or HTML documentation from the gengetopt configuration format
A way to reuse C/C++ source code and to reuse gengetopt configuration lines when I have multiple programs that share some common command line options
Of course gengetopt can provide me with a documentation text by running
command --help
but I am searching for marked up documentation (e.g. HTML, DocBook, Unix man pages).
Do you know if there is any C/C++ command line argument tool/library with a liberal open source license that would suite my needs?
I guess that such a tool would use XML to specify the command line arguments. That would make it easy to generate documentation in different formats (e.g. man pages). The XML file should only be needed at build time to generate the C/C++ source code.
I know it is possible to use some other command line argument parsing library to read a configuration file in XML at runtime but I am looking for a tool that generate C/C++ source code from XML (or something similar) at build time.
Update 1
I would like to do as much as possible of the computations at compile time and as less as possible at run time. So I would like to avoid libraries that give you a map of the command line options, like for instance boost::program_options::variables_map ( tutorial ).
I other words, I prefer args_info.iterations_arg to vm["iterations"].as<int>()
User tsug303 suggested the library TCLAP. It looks quite nice. It would fit my needs to divide the options into groups so that I could reuse code when multiple programs share some common options. Although it doesn't generate out the source code from a configuration file format in XML, I almost marked that answer as the accepted answer.
But none of the suggested libraries fullfilled all of my requirements so I started thinking about writing my own library. A sketch: A new tool that would take as input a custom XML format and that would generate both C++ code and an XML schema. Some other C++ code is generated from the XML schema with the tool CodeSynthesis XSD. The two chunks of C++ code are combined into a library. One extra benefit is that we get an XML Schema for the command line options and that we get a way to serialize all of them into a binary format (in CDR format generated from CodeSynthesis XSD). I will see if I get the time to write such a library. Better of course is to find a libraray that has already been implemented.
Today I read about user Nore's suggested alternative. It looks promising and I will be eager to try it out when the planned C++ code generation has been implemented. The suggestion from Nore looks to be the closest thing to what I have been looking for.
Maybe this TCLAP library would fit your needs ?
May I suggest you look at this project. It is something I am currently working on: A XSD Schema to describe command line arguments in XML. I made XSLT transformations to create bash and Python code, XUL frontend interface and HTML documentation.
Unfortunately, I do not generate C/C++ code yet (it is planed).
Edit: a first working version of the C parser is now available. Hope it helps
I will add yet another project called protoargs. It generates C++ argument parser code out of protobuf proto file, using cxxopts.
Unfortunately it does not satisfy all author needs. No documentation generated. no compile time computation. However someone may find it useful.
UPD: As mentioned in comments, I must specify that this is my own project
I need my program to create and edit a config file, which would contain information about set of objects, and than read it at every execution. Is there some sort of guideline for config style that i can use?
I'm using C++ on windows.
I recommend checking out boost::property_tree.
The Property Tree library provides a data structure that stores an arbitrarily deeply nested tree of values, indexed at each level by some key. Each node of the tree stores its own value, plus an ordered list of its subnodes and their keys. The tree allows easy access to any of its nodes by means of a path, which is a concatenation of multiple keys.
Additionally, it contains parsers and generators for XML, INI, and JSON, so you can save/load in the format of your choice.
It largely depends on the language, platform and the scope of your config files. There's for example the properties files in Java world for configuration, and others already mentioned here such as YAML.
XML is generally frowned upon for configuration, since it's very verbose. You still find it in many applications, Web frameworks, etc.
I think the best practice would be to choose the right configuration format for the job at hand. You can evaluate and try them for yourself, while considering these pointers:
What's the standard? (e.g. ini files in Windows, properties files in Java)
Is there native support in my language, or do I have to roll my own implementation?
Can my configuration format easily describe what I want to store as configuration?
I'm sure you could think of other considerations. If you update your question to clarify the scope, you'll get more useful answers.
YAML is a very popular solution for creating configuration files. It is used prominently by Ruby on Rails and Google AppEngine, for instance. YAML libraries are available for many if not most languages.
If you're working with Qt (based on your other questions),
look at the QSettings class. I've been using these to set a lot of persistent info, such as last visited directory, and which options were last used.
boost::program_options has some capacity to read ini files.
What is nice is that is allow to unify reading ini file and command line options. As Windows program goes, that may not be seen as such an interresting future, but for my unix app it was a killer feature.
However, boost::po does not allow editing or writing of ini files, hence you'll probably be better off with boost::property_tree.
The most common format is the INI File format. Most mdoern languages should have something built in to handle these, otherwise I'm sure you'd be able to find a third-party library.
Failing this, you could use XML, and if your language supports it, serializing to and deserializing from these XML files. If you don't want to/can't use XML, most languages will have a default format they use, such as a pure binary dump of the data in an object.
There is a free, cross-platform library for configuration file management, called libconfig. It supports very nice Yaml-based grammar, and supports user-defined grammar too. It also has many other computing language bindings. See it's homepage: http://www.hyperrealm.com/libconfig/ .
In the Java world, a properties file is pretty easy to use:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Properties.html
The Properties class represents a persistent set of properties. The Properties can be saved to a stream or loaded from a stream. Each key and its corresponding value in the property list is a string.
As the others have said, you would need to describe your environment to get the best recommendation.
I've been tasked with creating a tool that can diff and merge the configuration files for my company's product. The configurations are stored as either XML or URL-encoded strings. I'm looking for a library, preferably open source with a license compatible with commercial software, that can do these diffs. Our app is written in C++, so C++ libraries would be best, but I'm willing to look at libraries that are C#-specific since I can write a wrapper that exposes it to C++ via COM. Three-way diffs would be ideal, but two-way is acceptable. If it has an understanding of XML, that would also be a plus (since XML nodes can be reordered without changing the document, etc). Any library suggestions? Should I even consider writing my own diff tools in the hopes of giving it semantic knowledge of our formats?
Thanks to this similar question, I've already discovered this google library, which seems really great, but I'm still looking for other options. It also seems to be able to output the diffs in HTML format (using the <ins> and <del> tags that I didn't know existed before I discovered it), which could be really handy, but it seems to be a unified diff only. I'm going to need to display the results in a web browser, and probably have to build an interface for doing the merges in the browser as well. I don't expect a library to be able to help with these tasks, but it must produce output in a format that is amenable to me building this on top of it. I'm currently envisioning something along the lines of TortoiseMerge (side-by-side diffs, not unified), except browser-based. Any tips/tricks/design ideas on how to present this would be appreciated too.
Subversion comes with libsvn_diff and libsvn_delta licensed under Apache Software License.
Here is a C++ library that can diff what the author calls semistructured data. It deals nicely with HTML and XML. Since your data is XML it would make a lot of sense to use this instead of plain text diff. This is especially the case when the files are machine generated.
I am currently trying to use this library to build a tool that diffs Visual Studio project files. These are basically XML files and using a plain diff tool like Winmerge is too painful because Visual Studio pretty much mucks up the whole file by crazy reordering. The idea is to do some kind of a structured diff to address the problem.
For diffing the XML I would propose that you normalize it first: sort all the elements in alphabetic order, then generate a stream of tokens/xml that represents the original document but is independent of the original formatting. After running the diff, parse the result to get a tree containing what was added / removed.