shep | # 1 | 2010-02-06, 01:11 | Report

Hi All,

I have a Qt app and I want the users to be able to save some config settings in a simple text file.

I have it all working (now there's a miracle), but I'm saving the file to /home/user/MyDocs/myapp.config

I'm pretty sure that's a lousey place to put it!

Is there a convention for where apps should store data files? for my next app I intend implementing a lot more file IO.

Shep

wmarone | # 2 | 2010-02-06, 01:16 | Report

I seem to recall a post or two regarding this recently, however I cannot recall where they are.

When saving application settings on Linux (and therefore Maemo) you want to save them in the user's home directory, in a subdirectory or file whose name begins with a period.

Thus the path to your settings directory (or file) would be:

/home/usr/.myapp
or
/home/usr/.myapp.conf

You can see this on your device if you go to the terminal and type:

ls -la

VDVsx | # 3 | 2010-02-06, 12:24 | Report

If only the app should modify that file, you should put it in '/home/usr/.myapp', in the current location the user will see the file when in mass storage mode, and some users will delete it by accident .

zwer | # 4 | 2010-02-06, 12:57 | Report

Tho, if you plan on storing large files (videos, music, maps, whatever) you should probably put them on the mass storage partition. For my tests I use /home/user/MyDocs/.appName/ . It will show up to users in Mass Storage mode, but not when using PC-Suite Mode... Either way, that should be a place where you store non-essential large data.

pbouda | # 5 | 2010-02-06, 20:31 | Report

I use QSettings in my Qt apps. It creates a config file for you in .config/CompanyName/AppName.conf. You can set the company name and application name when creating the QSettings object:

QSettings settings("CompanyName", "AppName");
settings.setValue("myConfigValue", 10);

I think this is the easiest way to save config data in your application.

Peter

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Last edited by pbouda; 2010-02-06 at 20:44.

shep | # 6 | 2010-02-07, 00:16 | Report

Thanks a million for this, I have implemented this now and it works great.