Advanced Collection for VB6 Application Settings

• Download App_Configuration - 4.71 KB
• Download Common_module - 10.2 KB

Introduction

In this article, I tried to implement the following things:

1. Manipulate application configuration data and settings as Name Value collection
2. Provide advanced GetSetting and SaveSetting functions
3. Provide advanced INI file handling
4. Implement escape sequence characters for settings

Background

VB6 provides GetSetting and SaveSetting functions to programmers to manipulate application settings. These settings are stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ VB and VBA Program Settings\ location of the windows registry.

Disadvantages

1. Note that these settings store under current user settings of registry. So in multi user Windows system, each user may have different settings.
2. Since the speed of Windows depends up on the Windows registry size also, we can't store a large amount of information on the registry.
3. Moving configuration data from one machine to another machine is very hard.
   Please note that the earlier version of Windows provides 2 functions namely
   getprivateprofilestring, writeprivateprofilestring for manipulation of application data by using files. But Microsoft states that "This function is provided only for compatibility with 16-bit Windows-based applications. Win32-based applications should store initialization information in the registry."
   
   So I implemented Name Value collection in VB6 to read and write settings of an application from a text file so that we can easily move the application from one machine to another machine.

Using the Code

'Assigns filename to collection to perform operation
Settings.FileName = "ConverterSettings.ini"

'Load collection items from file 
Settings.LoadContents

'Save collection to file
Settings.SaveCollectionToFile

'Add / Modify an item
CollectionName("Name/Key") = value

'Remove an item
CollectionName.Remove(index / Key)

'Replacement of GetSetting function
Public Function GetMySetting(AppName As String, Section As String, _
            Key As String, Optional Default As String) As String
    GetMySetting = Settings.GetItem(AppName & "_" & Section & "_" & Key,_
              , Default)
End Function

'Replacement of SaveSetting function
Public Function SaveMySetting(AppName As String, Section As String, _
            Key As String, Setting As String)
    Settings(AppName & "_" & Section & "_" & Key) = Setting
End Function

List of functions implemented on class module and their meaning:

Points of Interest

I added a module that processes file and Windows operations with proper status codes with this article.

History

• Version 1 released on April 20, 2008