Config files best practices

[ce_nort]

That wouldn't work so well for us as the applications are pretty much never called via the command line. The users of the applications are general retail employees so they click on the .exe file to run it, and when in development I build and run them in Qt Creator.

[jefftee]

I was thinking more along the lines of desktop icons that passed the appropriate command line arguments, i.e. "Foo Prod", "Foo Develop", etc. but if that doesn't work for you, then obviously it's not a good choice...

Good luck!

[d_stranz]

Perhaps you could use a QSettings INI-type file to store your environment flag. The app looks for the file (and flag entry) at startup, and if it finds it, it uses that mode. Otherwise, it goes to the default mode (production, presumably). You'll only need the QSettings file on your development / testing machine, not on the machines deployed to users.

By the way, a year or two ago I posted code here that provides a QSettings interface to XML files. You might find it easier to use for your user-side XML config files.

[anda_skoa]

That wouldn't work so well for us as the applications are pretty much never called via the command line. The users of the applications are general retail employees so they click on the .exe file to run it, and when in development I build and run them in Qt Creator.

That wouldn't be a problem as far as I can tell.

If the application is started without arguments, it just uses the default path or default file name.

If you run in QtCreator you can easily pass arguments as part of the run settings.

Another option is to use an environment variable or even have both options, one overriding the other if both are present.

Cheers,
_

[ce_nort]

Sounds like there are a few good options out there! Thanks for the ideas. I'll look into them and decide what will work best for us, they all sound like a potential improvement upon the approaches that we came up with.