@martin-pettersson/config

Config

A simple yet powerful configuration object

Usage

You can instantiate an empty Config object or pass an object to the constructor to initialize it with an existing data structure.

// empty data structure
var config = new Config();

// existing data structure
var config = new Config({
    name: "Martin Pettersson",
    age: 27,
    pets: [
        "none",
        "none",
        "and",
        "NONE!"
    ]
});

The configuration object uses dot-notation to navigate the data structure eg.

config.get("deeply.nested.value");

Given the following data structure the above statement would return true

{
    deeply: {
        nested: {
            value: true
        }
    }
}

The same goes for adding values to the config object. Given an empty config object the following statement would create the same data structure.

config.put("deeply.nested.value", true);

The config object will create the nested data structure as needed or just append to the existing one.

Config Section

The ConfigSection extends Config but holds an internal reference to a Config object and operates on a given "section" of that config object. So the following statement:

var configSection = new ConfigSection("section", config);

configSection.put("name", "Martin");

Would produce the following data structure:

{
    section: {
        name: "Martin"
    }
}

So the config section can only change the data structure within its given section name. What's more is that because the ConfigSection carries a reference to a Config object and operates on that reference. The Config object is being updated directly without the need for any additional bindings. Let's have a complete example of that:

var Config = require("@martin-pettersson/config").Config;
var ConfigSection = require("@martin-pettersson/config").ConfigSection;

var person = new Config();
var work = new ConfigSection("work", person);

person.put("firstName", "Martin");
person.put("lastName", "Pettersson");
person.put("age", 27);

// this will immediately be reflected on the person Config object
work.put("name", "Internetavdelningen");

console.log(
    "%s %s is %d years old and works at %s",
    person.get("firstName"),
    person.get("lastName"),
    person.get("age"),

    // we can now access the nested config section value from the person object
    person.get("work.name")
);

// output: Martin Pettersson is 27 years old and works at Internetavdelningen

The ConfigSection object can be a very powerful tool, each section of your program could be given their very own ConfigSection object and you could very easily keep a record of all the programs settings in one place. This makes persisting the settings a breeze. And as it actually extends Config it would of course pass:

if (configSection instanceof Config) { // ...