17.4 SettingsManager

The SettingsManager class in the Cheetah.SettingsManager module is a baseclass that provides facilities for managing application settings. It facilitates the use of user-supplied configuration files to fine tune an application. A setting is a key/value pair that an application or component (e.g., a filter, or your own servlets) looks up and treats as a configuration value to modify its (the component's) behaviour.

SettingsManager is designed to:

work well with nested settings dictionaries of any depth
read/write .ini style config files (or strings)
read settings from Python source files (or strings) so that complex Python objects can be stored in the application's settings dictionary. For example, you might want to store references to various classes that are used by the application, and plugins to the application might want to substitute one class for another.
allow sections in .ini config files to be extended by settings in Python src files. If a section contains a setting like ``importSettings=mySettings.py'', SettingsManager will merge all the settings defined in ``mySettings.py'' with the settings for that section that are defined in the .ini config file.
maintain the case of setting names, unlike the ConfigParser module

Cheetah uses SettingsManager to manage its configuration settings. SettingsManager might also be useful in your own applications. See the source code and docstrings in the file src/SettingsManager.py for more information.