Files to a program

Hi,

I'm writing here because I'm not really aware of the proper searching keywords. I would like to have some initializer files attached to my program. Qt's resource system is not the answer because I would like to have it just like a normal file (not compiled into the program). There I would store some variables or user-defined paths ect so these would be basically simple text files for storing not hard-coded values.

Now my question is how to do this properly? Or simply define a relative path that will be valid from the exe and if this relative path is hard coded than simply that's it? I was just wondering if there is a better way by which when I compile the release version the necessary folders and files would be generated.

The answer can be Qt-based, but I thought this should be a more general question.

There are many solutions:

Qt based
You can use QSettings and save your file in the exe path.
You can use QCoreApplication::applicationDirPath to know how there's you file.
You can also use QDesktopServices

General
You can pass the path as command line arguments

It looks I'm seaching for QSettings. I can see a small example that I seem to have understood at the end of a qtforum.org topic. (However I couldn't make that code work as QSetttings has no members called readEntry nor writeEntry and QString has no member named local8bit, so it is also a wonder for me why this should work.)

Now do I see well that this will save settings into a qt-related folder?

Could someone maybe write me a short fake code just to see the logic? I would like to make a portable application so I will have everything in a folder like this:
myApp/
.....settingFiles/
..........1st.txt
..........2nd.txt
.....images/
..........img1.png
..........img2.png
myApp.exe
(necessary dlls)

It is an application with a GUI.
I would like to store the settings into the settingFiles folder where I will have settings not related to the environment but values that may control the application's work and they should be easilly changeable.

Is there maybe a tutorial focusing on QSettings? I is represented in the built-in Application example but not very well explained.

the post is very old!!!

however you can write code like this

Code:

---

QString appPath = QApplication::applicationDirPath();
 
QSettings settings1 (appPath + "/settingFiles/1st.txt", QSettings::IniFormat);
// Read data
 
QSettings settings2 (appPath + "/settingFiles/2nd.txt", QSettings::IniFormat);
// Read data

---