Ini files have been around for some time now and are very useful for storing small amounts of data, and I use them as an alternative to the registry. Years ago I found that they had been designed with a limit of 64k, however these days it is possible to store more than that. Recently I needed to store a fair bit more than ini files are intended for and after some research decided the way to use them.
There are 2 main classes for reading and writing to ini files TIniFile and TMemIniFile, but which one should you use?
Basically, I found out that TIniFile should be used to write to the file and TMemIniFile should be used to read from the file. A few people mentioned to me to just use the TMemIniFile and you should not use TIniFile, however I believe the TMemIniFile uses an internal hash table which causes writing to the file to be slow. So there it is, use TIniFile to write and TMemIniFile to read.
Serving my thoughts and experiences of developing software with Embarcadero Delphi
Done some more tests recently and I am not sure using TIniFile for writing is the best option. I found that writing a section to be faster using TMemInifile.
ReplyDeletewith TMemIniFile writing you will lose comments placed in the IniFile !
ReplyDelete