Word Document Properties

Chapter 10: Working with Disk Files
16_046500 ch10.qxp 12/5/06 5:36 PM Page 233

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It’s important to provide a section header for each of your 
Dictionary
objects, or else you can’t parse the file later. The code writes this heading
first, and then it writes the individual key/value pairs by using a 
For
Each...Next
statement. You can create a single routine to perform this
task, but using the technique shown in the code is actually easier to under-
stand and is self-documenting to a point. As always, make sure that you close
the configuration file before you exit the sub-procedure.
It’s time to look at the 
OpenWriteConfig
sub-procedure in a little more
detail. Listing 10-2 shows this code.
Listing 10-2
Opening a Configuration File for Writing
Public Sub OpenWriteConfig( _
AppName As String, _
Filename As String, _
ByRef Output As TextStream)
‘ Define the path variable.
Dim DataPath As String
‘ Create a path string for the file. Start with the
‘ default program settings path. Add a special folder
‘ for this program.
DataPath = Application.UserLibraryPath + AppName + “\”
‘ Create a file system object.
Dim FS As FileSystemObject
Set FS = New FileSystemObject
‘ Verify the path exists.
If Not FS.FolderExists(DataPath) Then
‘ If not, create it.
FS.CreateFolder DataPath
End If
‘ Create a text file object.
Set Output = FS.CreateTextFile(DataPath + Filename)
End Sub
The code begins by determining the location of the user folder. It then adds
the application name to the path to locate the folder for this application. You
can use this same code no matter what user setting file you open. Creating a
connection to other common folder types follows a similar pattern.
At this point, you need to create a 
FileSystemObject
and use it to deter-
mine whether the application folder exists. If the folder doesn’t exist, you
must create it before you can write data to it. The example uses the
FS.CreateFolder
method to create the new folder.
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