[Interest] Write QSettings to a QString in INI format

[Konrad Rosenbaum]

Hi,

On 10/24/19 5:53 PM, Murphy, Sean wrote:
> I'd like to be able to have QSettings write out my settings to an INI file format, but I'd like to avoid writing it to an actual file, instead just writing it to "something" in memory (for example, a QString, QByteArray, QBuffer, etc.).
>
That's because QSettings is rather complex underneath - it handles stuff 
like multiple instances accessing the same file at the same time, 
hierarchies of settings-files (e.g. system level and user level), etc. 
If you handed in a QIODevice then QSettings could not be sure what the 
state of the underlying IO-Object is and whether it is safe to access it.
> So I if all the above is correct, and there is no way to write an INI formatted string to memory, and given the fact that I really don't want a file in the first place, I decided to look at writing the settings out to a QTemporaryFile, then just reading that data back in as a string, and then let the QTemporaryFile go out of scope and clean itself up. But according to the following test code, QSettings does not seem to play nicely with QTemporaryFile:
This is basically the way to go.
>
> void MainWindow::writeSettings()
> {
> // comment/uncomment the *define* below to switch implementations
> #define USE_QTEMPORARY_FILE
>
> #ifdef USE_QTEMPORARY_FILE
>      // using a QTemporaryFile doesn't seem to work
>      QTemporaryFile tempFile;
>      bool ok = tempFile.open();
> #else
>      // if instead you use a regular QFile, it works
>      QFile tempFile("tempFile.ini");
>      bool ok = tempFile.open(QIODevice::ReadWrite);
> #endif
>
>      if(ok)
>      {
>          qDebug() << "Opened" << tempFile.fileName();
>      } else {
>          qDebug() << "Unable to open" << tempFile.fileName();
>      }
Call tempFile.fileName() before you call close()! (But close() before 
you instantiate QSettings.)
>      tempFile.close();
>
>      QSettings settings(tempFile.fileName(), QSettings::IniFormat);
>      settings.setValue("string", "hello");
>      settings.setValue("int", 2);
>
>      settings.sync();
>      // using QTemporaryFile always produces an AccessError here,
Because QSettings has the file locked. Make sure settings goes out of 
scope before you re-open the file.


     Konrad