Question

Im currently working on a java program and I need to read/write to the registry. i’ve looked at several API’s to do this and I found ini4j (ini4j Project Page). I also need to edit ini files so I like this solution because it does both. I’m curious if anybody has tried ini4j in this type of scenario?

Answer 1

I found a better solution for reading/writing to the registry without the need for ini4j or passing arguments to the command line. I use JNA quite a lot in my program so I figured that it would be easier to use native library calls instead of including an additional library to do this for me. Here is an example from my project were I search through the registry looking for a specific key. The specific key is also dependent on whether or not the OS is x64 or x86.

   public static String GetUninstallerPath() {
        try {
            //if (logger.IsInfoEnabled) logger.Info("GetUninstallerPath - begin");

            String uninstallerPath = null;

            try {
                String vncDisplayName = "UltraVNC";
                String subkey32 = "Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall";
                String subkey64 = "Software\\Wow6432Node\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall";

                boolean is64Bit = Platform.is64Bit();
                String[] key;
                if (is64Bit) {
                    key = Advapi32Util.registryGetKeys(WinReg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
                            subkey64);
                } else {
                    key = Advapi32Util.registryGetKeys(WinReg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
                            subkey32);
                }

                if (key != null) {
                    for (String nextSubkeyName : key) {

                        TreeMap<String, Object> subKey = Advapi32Util.registryGetValues(
                                WinReg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
                                subkey64 + "\\" + nextSubkeyName);
                        Object value = subKey.get("DisplayName");
                        Object path = null;
                        if (value != null) {
                            if (value.toString().startsWith(vncDisplayName)) {
                                path = subKey.get("UninstallString");
                                if (path != null) {
                                    uninstallerPath = path.toString().trim();
                                }
                            }
                        }

                    }

                }

            }
            catch (Exception ex) {
                System.err.println(ex.getMessage());

            }

            return uninstallerPath;
         }
    }  

I use objects to initially store the key values because I kept getting NullPointerExceptions. Feel free to provide another solution.