DSP Robotics Support

Walter Sommerfeld wrote:I use the SysFolders AppData (in Win8: C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming) with added "\Appnamefolder"...

Works fine!

RJHollins wrote:The problem is the vst won't load the file back in
The exe does.

RJHollins wrote:It's the other os's giving grief

maybe put your 'datasaving' module in a 'vsti' module and hook it up to the adsr.
Upload it for further testing...

Normally the "visible" user's home directory is reserved for files that the user intentionally created, and programs should not create there any content without that the user agrees.

As has been mentioned, the temporary folder is not ideal. Although on Windows temporary files can survive for many years, we should not generally assume that they survive a reboot. I'm not sure if the parent folder of the temporary folder is a good idea (John, on OS X and other unices the parent of /tmp would be root / ?)

The ideal place would be to use the standard folder that is supposed to be used for application data. This can be depending on the operating system in ~/.local/share etc. or on Windows %AppData% which is under XP X:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application (localized!) and under Vista,7,8 X:\Users\[username]\Data AppData\Roaming. There seems to be a ruby environment variable ENV['APPDATA'] but it's not cross-platform and it's known not to be reliable on different Windows versions (this needs to be tested). The prefered way is over the C# API: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2588 ... -directory

Dan suggested that the SketchUp API should provide a method to get that folder path.Aerilius
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char appdir[MAX_PATH];      
    size_t requiredSize;
    errno_t err= getenv_s( &requiredSize, appdir, MAX_PATH, "appdata" );

The way the do this on Windows is to use the ApplicationData environment variable. If you were using C# you can get the folder it maps to using System.Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData), googling for the Ruby equivalent it's ENV['APPDATA']. In English-language Windows it maps to:

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\ (on Vista and Windows 7)

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\ (On XP)

It may map to a different folder in other languages, but as long as you get the directory from the enviroment variable and not hard-code it then it doesn't really make a difference. If you create a folder in there for your app and store the data there, Vista and 7 will allow read and write access to it without giving UAC prompts.

If you use ENV to get the user's TEMP/TMP folder... on PC its 'Temp' path is:
C:/Users/Username/Appdata/Local/Temp
On a PC there will be lots of app-specific folders made in
C:/users/username/appdata/local
So adding another one for your own tools 'XXX' should not be an issue.
C:/users/username/appdata/local/XXX

unless LOCALAPPDATA = ENV["LOCALAPPDATA"]
  # evals false because it's nil, we must be on XP, so:
  LOCALAPPDATA = File.join( ENV["USERPROFILE"], "/Local Settings/Application Data" )
end
# Otherwise on Windows ver 6+, and %LOCALAPPDATA% is defined, as:
# "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local"

On a modern PC the user's Temp folder's 'container' is going to be C:/Users/User/AppData/Local/: or something slightly different on XP...
On a MAC it's a seemingly meaningless folder name that contains the user's temp folder [named 'T']: something like /var/folders/rp/b9k42l5x7xngx_8tckgs0zdr0000gn/
Both of these 'containers' are consistently made and are intended to be always be fully read/writable by the user and the user's applications - that is why they are there.
The Unix-like /tmp folder should never be needed, and it's not returned by ENV [my earlier illustrations of a hierarchy of temp folders had it in as a 'fall back' should all else failed]...

Other apps use the 'Local' folder to store their data in their own subfolders.
The differences between Local and Roaming were also spelled out in one of my earlier posts in this thread.

The "correct" place for persistent data for an application that is not part of the installation is the appdata location. These directories are separate for each user and guaranteed to be readable/writable for the associated user. This is normally were things like plugins/extensions would exist, also.

A good example of this (if you have it installed) is Sublime Text. (On windows) it is installed to %PROGRAMFILES%/Sublime Text, which contains all required binaries and application defaults. Then in %LOCALAPPDATA%/Sublime Text/ (or %APPDATA%/Sublime Text 2/ for st2 user level information is available, including plugins, settings, key configurations, ...