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:

Name	Usage	Scope	Type
ProcessEscapeSequence	Converts escape sequence characters	Private	Function
ProcessINIContents	Parses file content to string lines	Private	Subroutine
ProcessLine	Load Keys and values from file lines	Private	Subroutine
Add	Adds new item to collection	Public	Function
Count	Returns number of items in collection	Public	Property Get
GetItem	Reads an item safely from collection	Public	Function
LoadContents	Loads collection from file	Public	Function
Remove	Removes an item from collection	Public	Subroutine
SaveCollectionToFile	Saves contents of collection to a file	Public	Function

Points of Interest

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

Name	Usage	Scope	Type
ExplorerOpen	Open a file in explorer	Public	Subroutine
ExplorerShowFile	Locate a file in explorer	Public	Subroutine
FileAppend	Append information to file	Public	Function
FileAppendString	Append string to file	Public	Function
FileExists	Check file exists in particular location or not	Public	Function
FileKillSafe	Kill a file from disk	Public	Function
FileMakeString	Replace file contents with a string	Public	Function
FileRead	Read file contents as bytearray	Public	Function
FileReadString	Read contents of a file in string format	Public	Function
FileStore	Store binary information(byte array) to a file	Public	Function
FillCombo	Fill a combo from file content string	Public	Subroutine
FolderExists	Check folder exists in given path or not	Public	Function
FolderKill	Delete this directory and all the SubFolders it contains.	Public	Function
GetMySetting	Replacement of GetSetting function	Public	Function
PathFileName	Get file name part of full file path	Public	Function
PathParent	Get Parent folder name	Public	Function
PathRemoveSlash	Remove slash from right most end	Public	Function
ProcessExecuteandWait	Execute a file and wait for it to finish	Public	Function
SaveMySetting	Replacement of SaveSetting function	Public	Function
StringStripNull	Return a string without the chr$(0) terminator.	Public	Function
WindowsTemporaryFolder	Get windows temporary folder path	Public	Function

History

• Version 1 released on April 20, 2008