Resources Revisited

Overview

Chapter 3 presented resources and resource files: what they were and how to use them. This chapter extends that presentation, with some of the more esoteric uses of resources and their relations.

It begins with the use of program instance names, a method by which a resource file can contain two (or more) sets of specifications for a single program, with the user able to choose a set at runtime. This is followed by a description of command-line options, which are used to change resource values at runtime.

The next topic is resource conversion, also known as type conversion. This is a mechanism by which the toolkit converts data from one type to another; it is primarily used to convert the ASCII text of a resource file to the internal format of a resource. There are two parts to this description: the first is how to write and install a resource converter; the second is how to call an existing converter from within application code.

The chapter finishes with a description of application resources: program variables that can be set at runtime via the resource mechanism.