UserProfile is a package for reading information from the disk file <YourName>.profile, or if none exists, User.profile. The purpose of the profile is to allow personalized tailoring of the system. The current catalogue of ways the Cedar can be parameterized may be found in the file UserProfile.doc.
Entries in the user's profile are of the form: <key>: <value>RETURN, where value is either (1) a BOOL, (2) an INT, (3) a TOKEN, or (4) a ListOfTokens (for more details, see UserProfile.doc). When Cedar is booted, rolledBack, or any file whose extension is "profile" is edited, the profile is parsed and a data structure which describes the information that was found in the profile is constructed. Comments (indicated using the standard "--" convention) can appear anywhere in the profile and will be ignored. The parsing will also ignore extra spaces or blank lines. Any errors or anomalies discovered when parsing or accessing the profile will cause diagnostics to be printed to the file UserProfile.log. The user will be informed that problems have been encountered via the Message Window. In no case however will the system break.
Access to individual profile entries via the procedures below is relatively efficient, since this access does not require any file reads or parsing. Therefore, many simple applications can simply read information from the profile as needed. However, some applications derive complex data structures from the profile (consider the effect of the "UserCategory" profile entry on the state of Tioga), and hence cannot afford to interrogate the profile whenever some information derived from it is used. Such an application must register a ProfileChangedProc and perform all of its profile interrogations from within this procedure. This guarantees that the corresponding values will be updated whenever the profile changes. The ProfileChangedProc will be called when it is first registered, whenever the system is booted or rolled-back, or whenever a file with extension ".profile" is saved.
Note: Since the ProfileChangedProc for an application is not called from that application's process(es), the application must explicitly synchronize its reads to variables derived from the profile with the ProfileChangedProc's writes to these variables. This may involve adding a monitor to an application that previously did not require one.