Question

I’ve been playing around with Zend_Config_Writer, and although I can make it do what I want I find the lack of formatting a bit disturbing since:

[production : general]
;
; Production site configuration data.
;

locale                                          = sv_SE
...

Becomes

[production : general]   
locale                                          = sv_SE
...

I realize that the “new” configuration is written based on the saved values in a Zend_Config object and this object doesn’t contain any comments or bland rows, but this makes the new configuration very hard to read especially for my co-workers.

Can this be solved somehow? The best I’ve come up with is using different sections with a “cascading” inheritance, but that seems like a stupid idea

Answer 1

After some experimenting I’ve solved my problem the following way and tested it successfully.

1. Split the config into multiple files. In my case I have 1 large application.ini that hold almost all my config and 1 small version.ini that holds some version-specific data
2. Create all (in my case 2) Zend_Config_ini objects separetly but set allowModification on one
3. Use the Zend_Config_Ini->Merge() functionality to merge all configs and then set it to readonly
4. To update any part of the config create a new Zend_Config_ini object from that specific ini file and set it to allow modifications and skip extents
5. Update the config and write the changes with the Zend_Config_Writer_ini

Example code:

/* Load the config */    
//Get the application-config and set 'allowModifications' => true
$config = new Zend_Config_Ini('../application/configs/application.ini',$state, array('allowModifications' => true));

//Get the second config-file
$configVersion = new Zend_Config_Ini('../application/configs/version.ini');

//Merge both config-files and then set it to read-only
$config->merge($configVersion);
$config->setReadOnly();

/* Update a part of the config */
$configVersion = new Zend_Config_Ini(
        APPLICATION_PATH.'/configs/version.ini',
        null,
        array('skipExtends' => true, 'allowModifications' => true)
    );

//Change some data here
$configVersion->newData = "Some data";

//Write the updated ini
$writer = new Zend_Config_Writer_Ini(
        array('config' => $configVersion, 'filename' => 'Path_To_Config_files/version.ini')
    );
    try
    {
        $writer->write();
    }
    catch (Exception $e) {
        //Error handling
    }