[thelist] Cold Fusion Application Config Files

[Mark M]

2 things instantly come to mind - 

1) Why not use XML? Seems like the obvious choice
2) Why not leverage the Java Properties class to access a .properties file.

Both work very nicely.

Hope that helps :o)

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Drew Shiel
Sent: Monday, 19 April 2004 10:44 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] Cold Fusion Application Config Files


Hi folks;

I'm currently engaged in putting together a set of RSS feeds running from 
our database. I'd like to hand control of these over to Marketing when I'm 
done developing them, and with that end in mind, I'm building a "control 
panel" application in Cold Fusion. One of the uses I envision for this is 
for Marketing to be able to build a new feed, picking and choosing 
categories of data from the database, and adding messages as items in that 
feed as they need to.

For this, I'd like to maintain a configuration file for each such feed. It 
would be handy were all the configs for all such feeds to be in one file - 
I don't expect more than a dozen such feeds to exist at any given time - 
but I can deal with separate files, too. Ideally, I'd like these files to 
be fairly human readable, too, in the same manner as most unix .conf files, 
for instance.

So is there a good or even an ideal way to set up the writing and reading 
of such files, a particular format that would be useful, or the like?

Writing them won't really be a problem, but I'd like the reading mechanism 
to be fairly simple. A function that just reads the file into an array, for 
instance, and holds it ready for use, seems like it would be ideal.

Or would I be better to hold all this information in a database table, and 
get to it that way?

Any ideas?

Drew.