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Advice: Plugin preference strategy
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Advice: Plugin preference strategy


  • Subject: Advice: Plugin preference strategy
  • From: John Pannell <email@hidden>
  • Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2006 14:55:55 -0700

Hi all-

I've been re-designing the architecture for my app, and have hit a question mark in the road related to plug-in bundles, application preferences, and subprocesses. While I'm confident that I have a solution, I'm concerned it may not be the *best* solution. Here's a brief outline of the issues; I'm grateful for any insights or suggestions anyone can offer!

My application consists of a number of interconnected pieces: the application that people launch is responsible for the UI the people see and work with, including the preferences for the application. The application can host plug-ins to extend the app, and loads all found plug-ins for the purpose of exposing them in the preferences. Ideally, the user can configure the plug-ins, and I (and eventually other developers) will provide nib-based UI in the plug-in bundle for such a purpose. Note that the application doesn't actually *use* the plug-in - it simply provides a way to configure the plug-in.

The application, during operation, creates a number of subprocesses (not threads) that are instances of another faceless application that are managed via distributed objects. These subprocesses are instructed to load *one* of the plug-ins (as chosen by the user during operation of the app), and will need access to this plug-in's configuration prefs to operate properly.

The question... where to keep the plug-in prefs?

The application needs to be able to read and write these preferences, while the faceless subprocess app need only read them. Anyone who writes a plug-in needs to be able to specify the defaults and whatever solution is used must allow evolution of defaults over time.

My current idea for a solution (no implementation yet) is to keep plug-in prefs as individual dictionaries inside the NSUserDefaults for the main UI app. They would be named by the bundle identifier for the plug-in. This way the app can read and write, and I suppose the subprocess could query the app for info (I could use addSuiteNamed: to read the app prefs from the subprocess, but I believe I would get sync problems, as the app keeps new values cached).

Something feels wrong about this to me, however. What if a single plug-in corrupts the all of the prefs? It seems to me like I want each plug-in to have its own prefs file, but I do not see a clean way to do it...

If anyone has any experience with these topics or more insight, please let me know... sorry for the long post!

John

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