>>Hi everybody,
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>>I'm thinking about the best way of saving some specific user's adjustments and environment. For instance, a user opens an application with a grid. He (she) makes some changes in grid's appearance. The next time I want to restore these changes. The most important property, however, would be to save and restore the record, on which the user stopped the other day. In other words, user had done some work with the application, opened it on the following day and now he/she starts from the saved position.
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>>I want to make some generic way of saving these kind of settings. My colleague has a quite complicated approach of Meta-Files, but I'm not 100% sure, we can port his idea with all its complicated implementation to our existing applications. So, I'm looking for something quite simple, but efficient. This is for multi-user environment. Another little problem: user may start an application with a different table, or he/she may finish with this table, so it might be deleted.
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>>Hopefully, you got the idea. I have some own ideas in mind (for instance, Robert Peirce's article gave me some thoughts), but I'd like to hear your advices too.
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>>Should it be form's method or our application object method? (We have only one main application object oJC).
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>>Thanks a lot in advance for your ideas.
>
>Nadya,
>
>One relevant question is: where to store the information? Some would use the Registry - this seems to be the Windows standard for many programs. However, if you save information into a shared table on a network, every user can recover his/her preferences, no matter on what machine they log-in. I personally prefer this approach. The table would have to have fields for: user (login name), object for which preferences are saved ("FrmClient", "FrmClient.Grid1", etc.), and the preferences themselves (especially: form size and position, column width and order in a grid).
>
Yes, this sounds like a reasonable approach and I'm thinking in this direction. Your's, Mark's and Will's suggestions already cleared things for me and confirmed, what I was thinking in the right direction. Still it's a general problem and we have to work through all details in our team. I passed this idea to my colleagues already, but haven't gotten responses yet. I'm also thinking about custom class, which would do saving/restoring and could be dropped on any form. I'm not sure, it should be included in our main application object, from my point of view, it could be a generic class, which should work in any framework. Basically, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, my colleague innovated this technique and used it for two applications successfully. However, his approach is way too complicated and from my point of view, could not be incorporated into any existing framework. That's why I'm thinking about creating this class, though some of his ideas or techniques, perhaps, could be adopted.

Thanks again.