Saving and loading configurations

Many applications that you will develop operate on input parameters set by the user. For example, it could be the color or position of some graphical elements or parameters used to set up communication with other applications. Reading configurations from external files is necessary for your applications. We will use a built-in Cinder support for reading and writing XML files to implement the configuration persistence mechanism.

Getting ready

Create two configurable variables in the main class: the IP address and the port of the host we are communicating with.

string mHostIP;
int mHostPort;

How to do it...

Now we will implement the loadConfig and saveConfig methods and use them to load the configuration on application startup and save the changes while closing.

1. Include the two following additional headers:

   #include "cinder/Utilities.h"
   #include "cinder/Xml.h"

2. We will prepare two methods for loading and saving the XML configuration file.

   void MainApp::loadConfig()...