PreferenceGroups

The PreferenceGroups package is a library for user preferences, organized by groups of primitive types, with metadata like a description of the preference and utilizes a file store using the JSON with comments file format (the *.jsonc file extension). The motivation is to better encapsulate preferences so from the developer implementing them, to the user being presented with them, and to the file store with comments, the context is preserved throughout.

Usage

A basic PreferenceGroup could be instantiated with:

using PreferenceGroups; PreferenceGroup group = PreferenceGroupBuilder .Create() .AddInt32(name: "Number", b => b .WithDefaultValue(13)) .AddString(name: "String", b => b .WithDescription("A string prefence.")) .Build(); PreferenceFile file = new(path: "Preferences.jsonc", indentChar: ' ', indentDepth: 2); // Writes group to the file, overwriting it if exists. file.Write(group); // Updates group according to the contents of the file. file.Update(group);

The contents of the Preferences.jsonc file will be:

{ // Default value: 13. "Number": null, // A string prefence. "String": null }

Structure

A Preference is the the basic unit of the library and it has an associated Name and Value, along with some additional metadata like what the DefaultValue is. A PreferenceGroup is a dictionary of Preferences where the key is the Name of the preference. A PreferenceStore is a generic dictionary of PreferenceStoreItems, where a PreferenceStoreItem can be a Preference, PreferenceGroup, PreferenceStore, an array of PreferenceGroup, or an array of PreferenceStore. This allows for a to be used in plugin architectures, such that a plugin developer could define a group in a structured way and understand the behavior that group will be implemented to the user. Different groups could be provided for expected plugins to provide.