JUL
29
2003

The configuration compiler

Submitted by Cornelius Schumacher

kdepim/libkdepim - (KDE CVS Commits)



This is going to be something really cool. I now have an example configuration dialog which is automatically generated from an XML description of the configuration options. This includes an automatically generated API to the configurations options for convenient access by the application, it will support all the fancy config stuff like immutable entries etc., and it provides a configuration dialog to edit the options without needing to write any additional code.



The best thing: It will be incredibly simple for a developer to use this. Drop the XML description of the configuration options into the source code directory, add custom code, if necessary, and you are done. You will get the configuration dialog for your application for free.



It also fits very nicely into the Qt/KDE framework along the lines of XML-GUI and uic. cfgc (the configuration compiler) will be for configuration what uic is for user interface. Maybe it might even make sense to add a configuration designer to provide a GUI for editing the configuration descriptions. Let's see...

Comments

nice idea and really over due. :-)

too bad that XML sucks to write and sucks to read... it's going to be a pain for people to work with that directly.

By KDE User at Tue, 07/29/2003 - 23:39

from the kautoconfig, afaik it does that already. draw the ui file in designer, name the controls and pop it in.

i know we have 3 cd burning apps, but lets not pull a microsoft here with the config guis

By Ian Reinhart Geiser at Wed, 07/30/2003 - 00:05

From the docs of KAutoConfig: "The name of the widget determines the name of the setting." What I want to get at is, that it depends on widgets. What if I want to conveniently work with config files without a GUI?
KPrefs is a more generic approach to easing the task to work with KConfig. KAutoConfig should be a layer above that.

By Matthias Kretz at Wed, 07/30/2003 - 20:49

We do the same in Kst. It reads in XML files and generates configuration guis dynamically at run time in order to configure plugins. No preprocessor is needed, it's all done at runtime, no GUI is specified, and tooltip and whatsthis are supported. Ours is not very generic though. It would take a bit of work to extract it from Kst

By KDE User at Wed, 07/30/2003 - 03:12

Sorry, what is Kst?

By Cornelius Schumacher at Wed, 07/30/2003 - 20:11