Resources or text file?

[joijo]

We are developping applications which have a 98% common for all the users and a 2% made special for each customer.

One of the things we need to make is to change controls captions one the exe is generated and the application running at the customer computer.

I have two ideas and I will ask you which do you thing will be the better or any other one which can be better

1.- Use resource files. I think they are included inside the exe so it will not be possible to update them without regenerating the exe. I am right?

2.- Use a text file which is loaded at the application start and contains all the captions.

[oh1mie]

I'm using textfile, then customer can make changes by him self

[Michael_Kamen]

oh1mie,

How do you do it then, with these captions?
I mean what happens if the customer (accidantely) changes the structure of your textfile? Does your program depend on a certain structere inside the textfile to combine the correct text with the correct caption?

[joijo]

As I can no get more opinions and my first though was to use text files I will work on this way.

Michael, I think it is easy to protect the file against customer manipulation, for example keeping it as read only with a .dll extension inside the Windows directory. Otherwise in my applications captions will not be critical as they will not be used in the code.

[SeaHag]

options.

1. use database (easy)
2. TExt file (easy)
3. Registry (easy)
4. Res files (easy)

Whith all 4 you`ll have to update something...
Just depends on how U want to do it.. And Who is doing it..

What do you feel comfortable doing

Seahag

[knochenfish]

Hello all,

btw, never learned something about these RESOURCE-stuff. Any advice out there?

Thanks and greetings

Wolf

[John McKernan]

Originally posted by knochenfish
Hello all,

btw, never learned something about these RESOURCE-stuff. Any advice out there?

Thanks and greetings

Wolf

Have you seen this?
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...ghlight=seahag

[knochenfish]

Thanks John,

to tired to check out tonite. But any help is welcome...

thx again!

Wolf

[John McKernan]

glad to, hope it helps

[oh1mie]

Originally posted by Michael_Kamen
oh1mie,

How do you do it then, with these captions?
I mean what happens if the customer (accidantely) changes the structure of your textfile? Does your program depend on a certain structere inside the textfile to combine the correct text with the correct caption?

I'm using ini file like a:

[Captions]
OriginalCaption=YourCaption
OriginalCaption1=YourCaption1
......

[Stryker]

I think that an INI file would probrably suit best for this job. A user opens it and sees the structure, and noramlly they wont play, but if they do play, the failed read for the vlaues wont produce an error, so you can set default vlaues on a failed read.

Alternatley, if someone really wants to change it ... the option is there, and its easy enough to find the info that they want to edit without trampling other settings.

Registry is another good way to do this, especially since most people dont play around in there.

Anyhows ... I've attached a module (which probrably even works) that contains ini read/write functions, and registry read/write functions.

for INI files, use writeINI and readINI, and for the registry, use writeREG and readREG.


Hope this helps.