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Configuration files

The Catalog software is made of separate Perl packages. All these packages have a configuration file that is read at startup time. They are found in the current working directory if no CONFIG_DIR environment variable is set, See section Environment variables.

The instructions found in the configuration files alter the behavior of Catalog. For instance, they can be used to change the display of an HTML page. The general structure of a configuration file is an ASCII file where lines beginning with a dash (#) are ignored as well as empty lines.

A configuration instruction has the following form

keyword = value

The keyword can contain alpha-numerical characters, underscore (_) and dash (-). The value can contain any character except newline or carriage return. There is no way to specify a multi-line value for a given keyword.

Here is a simple example of a configuration file:

#
# Name of the database to connect. 
#
base = test

Configurations instructions may be nested. If a keyword is not followed by an equal sign, it is considered to be the start of a sub section of the configuration file. The end of a sub section is marked by the keyword end, alone on a line. Here is a simple example:

#
# Parameters for set and enum built from tables instead of builtin types
#
dictionaries
        name = mydict
end

Nesting can be recursive. Note that the leading white spaces are cosmetic only and are ignored by the configuration file parser. Here is an example of recursively nested instructions:

#
# Parameters for set and enum built from tables instead of builtin types
#
dictionaries
        name = mydict
        mydict
                where = valid = 'yes'
        end
end

The white space characters surrounding the keyword and the value are always ignored. This means that there is no way to specify a value that would contain leading or trailing white space.

In the following chapters you will find a complete description of the configuration files available in Catalog.

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