choosing the right type of file

[phinds]

My experience says clearly you do NOT want to abandon it. You'd just be asking for headaches in debugging with no benefit. File size for the kind of thing you're talking about is trivial by today's standards so the savings you could get by using binary data is useless compared to the extra coding and debug time.

Remember, "KISS" (Keep It Simple Stupid)

[mikeycorn]

Okay, the great majority of the data being saved for the quiz in progress in string-type data, but there are some variables that also need to be stored and loaded.

Here's what I've had to resort to when trying to load the variables from the saved quiz in progress.

  Open Me.cdbPath.filename For Output As #1
    
    Line Input #1, Temp:  QBack = Val(Temp)

Goofy technique? Hack programming? Let me know how the seasoned programmer would go about it. Do I need to abandon using Print #1 to a txt file or is this conversion from variable to string (when saving) and back again (when loading) not too uncommon?

[cafeenman]

Umm.... not that I want to plug my code or anything, but I wrote the exact same kind of application a long time ago. I had not only text answers, but images as well that could have hotspots on them for the user to click and get scored.

basically I stored each topic in its own file and the user could select which topics they wanted to be tested on. I used a binary file for storage. Check the link in my sig for what I'm talking about.