Spot the warning signs in configuration file design

January 10, 2008, 10:18 AM — You have identified a set of parameters for your application and you are now
looking at how to store them, edit them, read them in and so on. For the sake
of illustration, let's say your application needs just two parameters called
v_height and h_width.



Well, what better place to start than a simple ini file in which you have something
like this:



[params]

v_height = 800

v_width = 1200


You might feel inclined to XML-ize this into something like this:



<params>

<v_height>800</v_height>

<v_width>1200</v_width>

</params>



So far so good. Both approaches have the benefit that you can grab off-the-shelf
bits'n'pieces to do most of the reading/writing/validating legwork. The simplicity
comes at a price. Two prices actually, readability and flexibility.



Let's start with readability. Imagine that setting the v_width parameter to
1.5 times the v_height parameter is a common idiom. A nice, self-documenting
way to write that would be:



v_height = 800

v_width = v_height * 1.5



Ah. But for that to work, your parameter file tools need to understand variables,
assignments and arithmetic. You could start coding it but gee, pretty soon you
find yourself down in the bowels of a mini-programming language in order to
handle this sort of thing:



v_height = 800

v_width = (v_height+100)/3.0 * 1.5



This is a slippery slope that gets steeper very quickly! Note that the slope
is exactly the same regardless of whether or not you start with a plain text
ini file approach or an XML approach.



<v_height>800</v_height>

<v_width>(v_height+100)/3.0 * 1.5</width>



You could, of course, add markup for the arithmetic expression but this rapidly
becomes unreadable and doesn't materially reduce the programming work involved
in evaluating the expressions.



The next big ramp up in the gradient of the slippery slope happens the day
your users say "If height is less than 100, width should always be 200.".



Now you end up wishing you could write something like this to keep everything
readable and self-documenting:



v_height = 800

if v_height < 100 then v_width = 200

else v_width = (v_height+100)/3.0 * 1.5



Looks familiar doesn't it? Apart from syntactic sugar details this is like
any number of Turing Complete programming languages. By the time your application's
parameter handling sub-system can handle the above you have created another
one! Note again, that XML-ifying this makes no material difference to the effort
involved. An <if> tag is not any easier to program against that an "if"
keyword. Moreover, XML-ifying the above leads to a very unpleasant tag soup...



What to do? There is another road. A road with great power but also great responsibility.
What if you captured the parameters in Python for example? Imagine a file called
params.py:



v_height = 800

if v_height < 100:

v_width = 200

else:

v_width = (v_height+100)/3.0 * 1.5



Done! Now all you need to do is load that up at run-time and off you go. The
same goes for Ruby or any number of interpreted programming languages. Perhaps
the language of most generic utility for this sort of thing at the moment is
Javascript. Parameterize your web application with Javascript. Send the Javascript
to the browser and eval it. Alternatively, use a server side Javascript implementation
(such as Rhino) to load you parameters into your application.



What's not to like? This looks like a great way to get really powerful, expressive
and readable configuration files for little effort. Well, there is a catch.
There always is. Once you open up your parameter files to the full power of
a programming language, bad things can happen. For example, some variant of
the following is almost certainly possible to write inadvertently orwith malice
of forethought – regardless of the language you choose:


while true : x = x


The result will probably be a hung application with little in the way of useful
logging messages to indicate what is going on.