Dealing with app preferences

Question

my app needs to store and retrieve user preferences as key/value pairs for different modules.
the same key may occur in several modules:
pseudo xml:
<module 1><name = yyyy></module 1>
<module 2><name = zzzz></module 2>
i want all data in ONE file.
whats the best practice for these requirements:
1. implement from scratch with a xml api
2. using Preferences API.
3. using Properties API storeToXML() etc. (sounds tempting but it produces ONE file for EACH Properties object, corresponding to one of my modules)

Answer 1

>
<module 1><name = yyyy></module 1>
<module 2><name = zzzz></module 2>
i want all data in ONE file.
whats the best practice for these requirements:
1. implement from scratch with a xml api
2. using Preferences API.
3. using Properties API storeToXML() etc. (sounds
tempting but it produces ONE file for EACH Properties
object, corresponding to one of my modules)Seems that you have got only one option left and making xml from scratch is not that deficult if you plan well and the deficult part will be parsing the xml back.
I suggest you to first create a data structure a class that can hold prefferences of multiple modules.
then that class must have a method like toXMLFile to save its content to a xml file and anotehr method called fromXML file to build the structure by parsing XML you may be able to use a XML api like NanoXML which is very simple to use.
NanoXML can be used for both reading and writing of XML but it writes XML all in one line.