ini++ subgroup syntax

[keokeo]

I can't remember the syntax for setting/creating a subgroup within a group. I tried "group"/"subgroup" but it didn't work. What is the correct syntax?

[Telephone]

whoever made this extension. I am very happy, you did a good job. it is user friendly and most important it works!

[keokeo]

Yes it's pretty good indeed. But I still don't know how to create a subgroup using the expression editor. Anyone, please?

[keokeo]

Nobody uses subgroups?

[nick_Peoples]

i have no idea what a subgroup is....i just stick with the normal ini object :/

[keokeo]

As the name might imply it is a group within a group. It's weird that there's no reference in the help file about how to create them , because otherwise it talks in great detail about them.

[Pixelthief]

Theres only 1 or 2 options that interact with them that I could spot, so I'm actually kind of curious as to how they work. I'd say the best thing is to experiment

[Jax]

Thank you for your comments, Telephone =]

I just tried to make up an example, but then I found a bug. Bah! They used to work, I know. The newest version of Ini++ should only be a week or so away, so I'll make sure it works then. Bah! More work! =P

So the first thing to know about Ini++ sub-groups is that they don't really exist. It's a convenience system for making it look like they exist.

The first one is reading and writing files. In the files we really want subgroups to be indented. So if you select the non-standard "Load and Save Subgroups" option, you can load a file like...

[one]
a=1
	[two]
	b=2
	c=3
		
	[three]
	d=4
		[four]
		e=5
f=6

[four]
g=7

and then 'two' and 'three' are subgroups of 'one', and 'four' is a subgroup of 'three'. It will save back in this format, too.

However, when you are actually using the Ini++ it is different. The concept of subgroups doesn't extend to the internals of Ini++. It just automatically renames them. So in memory, we actually have...

[one]
a=1
f=6
[one/two]
b=2
c=3	
[one/three]
d=4
[one/three/four]
e=5
[four]
g=7

(Note: Here is where the bug is. It's not loading it correctly there. I thought it did. Don't worry though, I'll fix it for the next release. It's possible it worked in older versions though.)

There is also an 'extra' feature for finding subgroups of a group. This is just for convenience, but it is fairly powerful.

Another area, by the way, where a feature is faked by renaming is 'repeated items'. Ini++ does not support having multiple items with the same name, but it does let you fake it by automatically renaming.

It may be on interest to people that when I started Ini++ v2.0 (which was given up in the end for Ini++ v1.5), I did make it natively support proper subgroups and repeated items (as well as saving to XML and loading it. Not really 'Ini' anymore is it!). It made it way, way, way harder to use though.

[keokeo]

I can't say I've managed to create subgroups, so I had to work around it and find another solution to my problem. But thank you very much for your long response Jax. I gather you've made this extention. It's great, I love it too.