Re: [boost] Property tree rev.5

From: Boris (boriss_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-18 08:39:28

Marcin Kalicinski wrote:
> Property tree library revision 5 (review version) is now in the boost
> vault. Documentation can be viewed online at
> http://kaalus.atspace.com/ptree

Hi Marcin,

I went through the documentation and used your property tree library to 
implement a configuraton class which loads configuration data from a file. 
Here are some notes:

* When going through the five minute tutorial in the documentation I missed 
what the header file is actually called I have to include. It would be good 
to start the tutorial with #include <boost/property_tree/ptree.hpp>.

* I haven't seen previous library versions but did you consider of adding 
another constructor explicit basic_ptree(Ch separator)? This would allow to 
change the separator ptree-wide.

* It should be emphasized in the documentation that eg. when you parse a XML 
file and expect keys to be case-insensitive you must use iptree and not 
ptree. The XML parser by itself doesn't do anything but copying keys and 
values to the property tree.

After all I appreciated to implement the (fairly small) configuration class 
in one hour instead of using full-featured XML parsers like MS XML and 
Expat. Property tree could be or use a generic tree class but what makes it 
handy are the read/write functions to populate and serialize a tree easily. 
In the longterm however a generic tree and the serializiation library might 
probably do the same what property tree does today. The advantage of 
property tree is however that it can be understood and used quickly.

Boris