🏗️ Architecture Overview

To use the CSV suite effectively, it is essential to understand the relationship between the Manager, the Reader, and the Grid. This architecture ensures that data remains high-performance and accessible throughout your game’s lifecycle.

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1. The Manager (The Interface)

The CanleyCSVManager is a Unity MonoBehaviour designed to live in your Scene. Its primary role is to act as the bridge between your storage (Disk/Resources) and your game logic.

• Interface: It provides the Unity Inspector fields to assign files and toggle settings.
• Orchestration: It handles the “loading” process and passes configuration settings—such as whitespace trimming or column padding—down to the underlying engine.

2. The Reader (The Data Holder)

The CanleyCSVReader is a persistent C# class managed by the component. Unlike a simple parser that runs once and disappears, the Reader stays in memory as long as the Manager exists.

• The Grid: It encapsulates a private _grid (a List<string[]>), which contains your parsed CSV data in a structured, indexable format.
• The Toolset: It provides the “Lite” toolset—methods like GetCell(), GetRowCount(), and GetHeaderIndex()—allowing you to query data directly from RAM with near-zero latency.

3. The Data Flow

When you initiate a load, the data follows a specific, optimized path:

1. Source: A file on disk (Application.persistentDataPath) or a TextAsset in a Resources folder.
2. Transfer: The Manager fetches the raw string and feeds it to the Reader.
3. Storage: The Reader parses the string into the Grid (RAM).
4. Access: Your scripts query the Reader to retrieve specific values from the Grid without ever re-accessing the hard drive.

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Why this matters for your implementation

For Static Data (eg Items/Rooms)

You only need to load the file once at the start of the game. The Reader holds that table in memory, acting as a high-speed read-only database for the duration of the session. This replaces the need to instantiate hundreds of individual ScriptableObject assets.

For Dynamic Data (eg Saves/Party)

The Manager handles the movement of data back to the disk via the Writer, ensuring your runtime changes—like player stats or inventory updates—are persisted correctly to the local file system.

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Summary Table

Object	Technical Role	Responsibility
Manager	Scene Component	File I/O, Path Management, and Initialization.
Reader	Data Container	Holding the Grid and providing search/retrieval methods.
Grid	Memory Buffer	The private List<string[]> where the raw data lives.

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Next Steps: Learn how to implement this in your project via the Quick Start Guide.