I am developing a Java Desktop Application. This app needs a configuration to be started. For this, I want to supply a defaultConfig.properties or defaultConfig.xml file with the application so that If user doesn’t select any configuration, then the application will start with the help of defaultConfig file.
But I am afraid of my application crash if the user accidentally edit the defaultConfig file. So Is there any mechanism through which I can check before the start of the application that whether the config file has changed or not.
How other applications (out in the market) deal with this type of situation in which their application depends on a configuration file?
If the user edited the config file accidentally or intentionally, then the application won’t run in future unless he re-installs the application.
I agree with David in that using a MD5 hash is a good and simple way to accomplish what you want.
Basically you would use the MD5 hashing code provided by the JDK (or somewhere else) to generate a hash-code based on the default data in Config.xml, and save that hash-code to a file (or hardcode it into the function that does the checking). Then each time your application starts load the hash-code that you saved to the file, and then load the Config.xml file and again generate a hash-code from it, compare the saved hash-code to the one generated from the loaded config file, if they are the same then the data has not changed, if they are different, then the data has been modified.
However as others are suggesting if the file should not be editable by the user then you should consider storing the configuration in a manner that the user can not easily edit. The easiest thing I can think of would be to wrap the
Output Streamthat you are using to write the Config.xml file in aGZIP Output Stream. Not only will this make it difficult for the user to edit the configuration file, but it will also cause the Config.xml file to take up less space.