Question

I have a C++ application which has written for years. There are a lot of classes.

Every time we want to change some parameter values, we need to manually update them in the code and recompile it. It is not convenient as the growing demands of the users. We would like the values of the classes to be configured out side of the application. Probably, reading form an xml is the best? for each user, we can make an xml configuration setting and send it together with the application. Is it a good approach?

For every class e.g: Class classA, should we create another class called: ConfigClassA then classA will use the configuration setting from ConfigClassA? We dont want to make a lot of changes in the current implementation.

Suppose there is a structure of an xml file:

<classes>
   <class name="ClassA">
      <variable id="isUp" value="true" />
   </class>
</classes>

In Xml, we can get the portion classA and parse it to ConfigClassA then classA has an instance of ConfigClass.

Or anybody has a better approach?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

In general I think that the whole configuration should be loaded when an application is launched, so you can immediately notify the user in case of an invalid configuration. In order to validate an XML file, you can use XML Schema.

However, if you don’t want to make a lot of changes in the current implementation, your idea could be a valid solution.