[fpc-pascal] Re: Fpc Access Violation if AppConfigDir doesn't exist.

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2013, Giuliano Colla wrote:

> 3) But if also the *path* to the file doesn't yet exist, it just crashes 
> without rising an exception that the user application can handle somehow.

This is incorrect. It does tell you why it fails.

>
> This is rather unpleasant, because the path provided by GetAppConfigXx does 
> usually exist, so you have an application which 99% of the times works just 
> fine, and 1% of the times crashes without telling why.

It tells you *exactly* why it 'crashes':

home: >./ti
An unhandled exception occurred at $000000000042AE87:
EFCreateError: Unable to create file "/tmp/path/to/nothing.txt"
   $000000000042AE87

home: >cat ti.pp
program ti;

uses inifiles;

begin
   with TMemIniFile.create('/tmp/path/to/nothing.txt') do
     try
       WriteString('A','B','C');
       UpdateFile;
     finally
       Free;
     end;
end.

However, I agree that it should try to create the path as well.
I have adapted the implementation.

You'll get an error telling you if it failed to create the dir:
An unhandled exception occurred at $0000000000427F7E:
EInOutError: Could not create directory "/my/path/to/"
   $0000000000427F7E

Which means that you are still (as previously) responsible for catching possible errors.
But these errors should be less frequent with this change.

Michael.