Recommendation for client-side data?

[Furiant]

I'm a newbie programmer.

I am working on a chat type application. The client can read and write to a database on the web server (things like account info, events data, and so on). I also need it to store user-specific data on the client's local machine (profiles which are associated with an account but have no security requirements, and other nonessential stuff).

I've been looking at the Settings and Application Configuration files, but I'm not sure how easy it would be for the user to read and write to these files at runtime, due to their structure. For instance, if I want to allow a user to create an arbitrary number of profiles, and for each profile an arbitrary number of favorite links, I'd like to have the ability to easily iterate through this data. Using a config file, it appears I'd have to do something like the following.

<profile1>
link1 = "www.google.com"
link2 = "www.yahoo.com"
...
<profile2>
...

Obviously a more robust data structure would be nice, be it an array or whatever.

Can someone tell me the best way to store and edit this data (via an application form) on the client?


Thanks in advance.

 

[delstar]

Maybe an object that can be serialized to a file. That way you can create properties such as .Links(as list(of string)), .Background, etc.