IniUtil v1.11

Welcome to IniUtil, A freeware COM DLL to allow easy access to the Win32 API's which deal with INI files.

IniUtil is a dual interface COM dll which is designed to allow access to reading / writing INI files from COM enabled languages / environments including ASP, Windows Script, JScript, VBScript, VBA, Visual Basic 6, Visual C++, Delphi etc etc. Although MS recommends usage of the registry over INI files and officially says that the API's are only provided for 16 bit compatibility, many products and people find INI files easier to use, less dangerous and more portable from one machine to another than use of the registry. Due to their widespread use and the lack of COM enabled ways to get at them, IniUtil was born.

Features

• Standard COM dual interface exposed.
• Closely models the Win32 API's.
• All of the Win32 INI SDK calls are exposed through the DLL.
• The DLL correctly handles underlying issues with the API's where you must know the size of what you are reading from an INI file before you actually read it. BTW, INI support in MFC suffers from this problem with strings being limited to 4096 bytes in size.
• Use of rich error information through the ISupportErrorInfo COM interface.
• Small footprint dll of just 349KB for x86 and 460KB for x64.
• Supports per user registration as well as the standard per machine registration. This is achieved by the use of the /n and /i command line options to regsvr32.

Usage

• The DLL is implemented with ATL with Visual C++ 2017.
• Make sure the dll is registered by using the command line utility regsvr32. e.g. Bring up a command prompt, navigate to the ReleaseU directory where you downloaded the iniutil to and type: "regsvr32 iniutil.dll". This will register the DLL on your system. If you want to register for x64, then repeat the above procedure in the ReleaseU64 directory. Please also note that per user registration of the dll is supported. For more information about this please see the help information for the /i:user and /n command line options to regsvr32.
• Fire up your development environment and use the standard COM mechanism in that environment to use the IniUtil DLL. Details of the DLL include 
  • CLSID: FACE413C-CC40-4A79-BE71-7E4D0F50D7D5 (Iniutil CoClass)
  • LIBID: 8151BF8F-5C6B-4B2A-9323-30210D6C5F54
  • IID: 97902811-AFF5-4875-89AD-64679B58439D (IIniUtil COM Interface)
  • type library Name: "IniUtil 1.0 Type Library",
  • Filename: iniutil.dll
  • DLL is self registering using the command line utilty RegSvr32.exe
  • A standard type library is contained inside the DLL.
  • Version Independent ProgID: "Naughter.IniUtil"
  • Version Dependent ProgID: "Naughter.IniUtil.1"

History

v1.11 (7 May 2022)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated the code to use C++ uniform initialization for all variable declarations.

v1.10 (10 March 2020)

• Updated copyright details.
• Fixed more Clang-Tidy static code analysis warnings in the code.

v1.09 (5 October 2018)

• Updated copyright details.
• Fixed a number of C++ core guidelines compiler warnings. These changes mean that the code will now only compile on VC 2017 or later.

v1.08 (2 May 2017)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated the code to compile cleanly using /permissive-.

v1.07 (30 October 2016)

• Updated copyright details.
• Made IniUtil freeware instead of shareware. Now included in the zip file download is the source code for IniUtil
• Updated code to clean compile on VC 2010 - 2015.
• The binaries include in the download are now compiled using VC 2015 and include x64 binaries as well as x86 binaries.
• Replaced NULL with nullptr throughout the codebase
• Removed Non-Unicode build configurations from the project.

v1.06 (18 July 2006)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated documentation to use the same style as the web site.
• Code now uses SEVERITY_ERROR define for MAKE_HRESULT calls.
• Updated code to clean compile on VC 2005
• All calls to SysAllocString are now checked for failure.
• All C++ heap allocations via "new" are now checked for failure.

v1.05 (25 August 2003)

• Code now does not return an error if get_Sections detects no sections in the ini file
• Code now does not return an error if ReadSection detects no key value pairs in a section

v1.04 (30 July 2003)

• Updated all the functions which return COM SAFEARRAY's to instead return SAFEARRAY's of VARIANT's. This avoids problems which JScript has with VB style arrays.
• Updated code which returns COM errors to make use of MAKE_HRESULT.

30 April 2003

• Updated documentation to refer to online registration links.

v1.03 (20 March 2003)

• Fixed a bug in ReadString and ReadKeys where the default value is set to an empty string and the value(s) is not present in the ini file. Thanks to Serhiy Pavlov for reporting this problem.

v1.02 (16 January 2003)

• Fixed problem registering the dll. It was due to a missing registry script resource in the dll !.

v1.01 (27 November 2001)

• Removed dependency of dll on MFC. Now does not require any special dlls to be installed to use!.
• Made a few other tidy up changes to code base also.

v1.0 (25 November 2001)

• Initial public release.

API Reference

The COM object exposes the methods and variables

Filename
Sections
WriteString
WriteInteger
WriteVariant
WriteSection
ReadString
ReadInteger
ReadVariant
ReadSection
ReadKeys
DeleteSection
DeleteKey

Filename

[Visual Basic]

Property Filename as string

Remarks

Standard Read / Write property which specifies the INI file to operate on.

Sections

[Visual Basic]

Property Sections as Variant

Remarks

Standard read only property which returns an array of variant strings containing the sections in the INI file. For those unfamiliar with INI files, A section in an INI file is of the following form:

[section]
key=value
      .
      .
      .

WriteString

[Visual Basic]

Sub WriteString(Section As String, Key As String, Value As String)

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to write to

Key The key to use.

Value The value to write.

Remarks

Write a string to an INI file.

WriteInteger

[Visual Basic]

Sub WriteInteger(Section As String, Key As String, Value As Long)

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to write to

Key The key to use.

Value The value to write.

Remarks

Writes an integer to an INI file.

WriteVariant

[Visual Basic]

Sub WriteVariant(Section As String, Key As String, Value as Variant)

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to write to

Key The key to use.

Value The value to write.

Remarks

Writes a VARIANT to an INI file. Please note than only simple variant types are supported. The list of excluded types includes arrays (VT_ARRAY), COM pointers (VT_UNKNOWN and VT_DISPATCH) and by reference values (VY_BYREF). Internally the data will be character encoded to fit in the text only INI file format.

WriteSection

[Visual Basic]

Sub WriteSection(Section As String, KeyValues As Variant)

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to write to

KeyValue The array of key values pairs to write. Each key value pair should be of the form "Key=Value".

Remarks

Replaces the keys and values for the specified section in an INI file.

ReadString

[Visual Basic]

Function ReadString(Section As String, Key As String, DefaultValue As String) As String

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to read from

Key The key to read from.

DefaultValue The default value to return if the key is not found in the INI file.

Remarks

Reads a string from an INI file.

ReadInteger

[Visual Basic]

Function ReadInteger(Section As String, Key As String, DefaultValue As Long) As Long

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to read from

Key The key to read from.

DefaultValue The default value to return if the key is not found in the INI file.

Remarks

Reads an integer from an INI file.

ReadVariant

[Visual Basic]

Function ReadVariant(Section As String, Key As String) As Variant

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to read from

Key The key to read from.

Remarks

Reads a variant from an INI file.

ReadSection

[Visual Basic]

Function ReadSection(Section As String) As Variant

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to read from

Remarks

Reads all key value pairs from a section in an INI file. The return value will be an array of variant strings in the form "key=value".

ReadKeys

[Visual Basic]

Function ReadKeys(Section As String) As Variant

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to read from

Remarks

Reads all key from a section in an INI file. The return value will be an array of variant strings.

DeleteSection

[Visual Basic]

Function DeleteSection(Section As String)

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to delete

Remarks

Deletes a specified section from an INI file.

DeleteKey

[Visual Basic]

Function DeleteKey(Section As String, Key As String)

Parameters

Section The section of the INI file to use

Key The specific key to delete.

Remarks

Deletes a specified key from an INI file.

Contacting the Author

PJ Naughter
Email: pjna@naughter.com
Web: http://www.naughter.com
7 May 2022