Distributing User.pref changes

[CNelsen]

I'm wanting to distribute custom changes to the Document and Reports menu items across all users on a single server.

This is what I've figured out so far:
I've found the changes are stored in my user.pref file under the %APPDATA% path.
And If I create a user.pref file with these settings in the preferences/default directory of the install path it will get copied to the users %APPDATA% path when starting up PLSQL Developer only if one doesn't already exist there.

I'm wondering if there is a way to get this to work without deleting user.pref file of the individual users and thus removing any customizations they have set. In other words, merge their existing user.pref with the new default user.pref.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks,
Christian

 

[Marco Kalter]

You should not use user.prefs for this. Instead, you should create a default preference set and distribute that. This way the default settings and user settings are separated, and users can easily override and revert to the defaults.

See chapter 16.33 - "Preference sets" for more details.

 

[CNelsen]

That doesn't seem to work in this case.

The [Documents] and [Reports] sections only seem to reside in the user.pref file. Any [Documents] or [Reports] section in a *.ini file get removed the moment any other setting is saved.

I can create a default user.pref file and save it in the global defaults directory. Which seems to be the correct way to store the default values I want distributed. However, this isn't really a solution because it still has the problem that once a user.pref file is created the global file is never referenced, thus any changes don't get propagated.

I even removed the [Documents] and [Reports] sections from my personal user.pref file and the next time I started the app these sections were regenerated with blank values rather than using the values in the global file.

So the only way I've been able to propagate changes to these two sections is by manually modifying every users user.pref file by hand.

If there is another way, I would love to know.

Thanks,
Christian