Feature: storing settings in human readable format

I'd suggest storing SQL Assistant settings in text or XML or some other human readable format. It would make comparing the old settings to the new ones and transferring the relevant changes much easier.

Also, every time a new version is installed/upgraded the default snippets are inserted. Most of those I'd removed or replaced with a customized one and I have to remove the defaults after every upgrade. Having a vast number of snippets this can prove a tedious job.

+1. Trying to decipher differences in BeyondCompare is a bit hairy.

I must bump this one a bit :) I recently began storing SqlAssist.sas in an svn repository to keep my modifications safe from accidental overwrites/losses during beta updates and to be able to check what's changed, adding my two cents to the default settings would be extremely less tedious if the settings were stored in some human readable format. Really. Please. Consider changing format to simple text or XML.

We are planning on switching to XML, but that requires a major release with deep internal changes to make the switch.

I personally don't like that idea much, the SAS file is read/write accessed very frequently, it's becoming fairly large and parsing/serializing/deserializing large XML files is resource intensive and may create a significant performance burden on the system. I think there should be a right balance between convenience and efficiency, in my personal option SAS file supporting random access I/O is much more efficient.

Last edited by SysOp on Wed Nov 26, 2014 12:20 pm; edited 1 time in total

Point taken. Do you find an alternative of being able to export the SAS file to XML acceptable? This would retain the best of both worlds. The original file structure would remain efficient and the exported XML could be easily compared to earlier versions.

Or an even more intriguing approach. Storing the settings (and everything else as well) in an SQLite database file. That should still be pretty efficient for read/write (compared to XML) and could be compared in SQL Editor itself. Settings for entire releases could be stored in a single file.

Enhancing settings import/export to support XML format sounds like a great idea. Thank you so much. I will submit an enhancement request for this one.

I'd like something human readable too, but I don't think XML is the answer. It's too verbose with all those tags.

I don't have a better suggestion that I have experience with but a lot of folks seem to like JSON for this sort of thing now.

I'm not clinging to XML either. Anything would work that makes comparing easier.