Working on Savable Settings (2/26)

I know it was a snow day, but I felt the need to at least put some time towards LibriFox. I felt as if there was a lot of stuff that we were so close to creating, and so I decided to work on it a bit!

Today, I accomplished something I find important: savable settings.

We already have JSON and search functionality will hopefully come tomorrow, so I did some research into how I could get the settings to save, and return as soon as a user comes back in the app.

At first, I messed around with creating files manually. I couldn't find anything on Mozilla's website about savable settings (maybe I didn't look enough?) so I worked on some very large and complicated methods to do it for me. I was able to get settings to save, but I couldn't add settings to the file. I tried help from various websites. I was ending up in the same place every time, the FileHandle API. Which, I now understand, but I don't really need it [yet].

I then did some more research and found that it was a lot more simpler. In fact, it's just a single line. This line involves a variable called localStorage, which looks like it's pretty much on every app - however I include checks to make sure it exists in my methods to make sure the file is saving.

LocalStorage defines the settings file. You basically just code:

localStorage.setItem(key, value)

And the settings are saved. You can later go back:

localStorage.getValue(key)

And get the value of any key you have previously set.

Here's my two usable methods that I have tested:

  function writeToSettings(key, value){ // Writes a key, value pair to settings
    if(window.localStorage){
      localStorage.setItem(key, value);
    }
  }
  function getValue(key){ // Gets a value based on a key provided
    if(window.localStorage){
      localStorage.getItem(key);
    }
  }

However, I'm currently having an issue as to it not saving when the app closes. I'll look into this more tomorrow.