Discussion of INIMAINT Groups

By Larry Martin.

An INIMAINT Group is a set of Applications in a specific INI file that has been formed and named by the user and is used as a convenient way to manipulate the contents of the INI file. Without some way to form subsets of all of the Applications in an INI file, the only way to manipulate it is either Application by Application, which can be tedious, or by using the entire file, which provides no flexibility. Since one of the objectives of INIMAINT is to give the user an easy way to create backups of all or part of his INI files and to provide an easy way to restore an INI file, neither level of manipulation is satisfactory.

INIMAINT solves this problem by giving the user the ability relate a set of Applications together into a Group. Forming the Group does not change the Application information in the INI file, it simply creates an additional Application in the file that describes the Groups that the user has formed. Once the Groups are created, then the Group name can be used in INIMAINT operations and all the Applications in the Group will be included.

For example, many users install a number of programs that put entries into the standard User INI file, normally OS2.INI. If there is a problem with the environment, something happens to the INI files or some other problem arises that clobbers the INI entries, then the only recovery is to re-customize all of these applications. If the user were to put all of these Applications into a Group called 'My Applications', then he would not have this problem. The My Applications Group could be backed up to a backup INI file at any time using the INICOPY program as follows:

INICOPY -IC:\OS2\OS2.INI -OC:\OS2\MYAPPS.INI -G"My Applications"

The above assumes the normal name and location for the INI files. The name of the Group must be enclosed in ""'s if it contains any blanks or the Command Processor will split it into two different command line entries and INICOPY will return an error.

The same Group could be restored to the User INI file as follows:

INICOPY -OC:\OS2\OS2.INI -IC:\OS2\MYAPPS.INI -G"My Applications"

In other words, simply reverse the Input and Output filenames.

It is intended that this same approach can be used to keep multiple physical computers in synch with each other. Right now, if the user has multiple systems, he must customize every installed application on every system. You cannot move the INI files from one system to another, since there is a lot of information in the INI files that is system specific. Using INIMAINT, this process is made much easier, since the target INI file can be on a diskette and, even if there are some minor differences between the systems such as drive letters or something like that, INIMAINT can be used to make modifications to the contents of the transfer INI file before it is copied to the new system. This does not need to be limited to installation situations. One possible approach would be to form an Applications Group and, whenever any significant change is made to any application, the changes can be transferred to the other systems. In fact, there is not reason, assuming the user had many systems and a LAN, that a separate transfer INI file could not be set up for every application, have it updated from a central source whenever a significant change is made and have a CMD file on individual client systems that would use the transfer INI files just for the applications installed on that system.

I suspect there are many ways to utilize the Group concept. As of this writing, INIMAINT has only been used by a few Beta testers and only for a short time. Hopefully, as more users install and use INIMAINT, more ideas on how the INIMAINT Groups can be used will be developed. I will do my best to include this new information into the INIMAINT documentation and make it available on the Compuserve IBMOS2 Forum.