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From: d88-jwa@nada.kth.se (Jon W{tte)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: How does one manage default files?
Message-ID: <1990May3.112707.4287@kth.se>
Date: 3 May 90 11:27:07 GMT
References: <9087@tank.uchicago.edu>
Sender: news@kth.se  (News Administrator)
Reply-To: d88-jwa@nada.kth.se (Jon W{tte)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 35

In article <9087@tank.uchicago.edu>, gft_robert@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes:

> How do you do this?  I could just search for a default file name which was
> hard-coded into the program, and ask if I can't locate that file.  The client
> thought a better idea would be to save in a resource the names of the
two files
> most recently used, and then ask if those can't be found.  Since one is not
> supposed to write to the resource fork of the app itself, this would require
> yet a third file in which to maintain these resources, right?  But
then I have

The standard way to do this is:

Have a resource struct that contains dirId and name of the files.
Save this resource in a "Preferences file" in the SYSTEM FOLDER.
The volRefNum of the system folder is available through SysEnvirons()
so you should have no problem saving it there.

If you want to get funky, do this:

Check for the system folder.
Check for a folder named "Preferences" in the system folder.
If there is no such folder, create it and create your empty "prefs" file.
Otherwise, check in that folder for your "prefs" file.
If there is none, create it, in the "Preferences" folder.

If everydbody sis this, we would soon not have the cluttered system
folders we now have.

						/ h+


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