From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-10-30 17:27:23
Vladimir Prus wrote:
>I have one more comment about the serialization library.
>I have a class with three member variables;
> unsigned resource_count;
> unsigned content_size;
> int* content;
>I started writing 'serialize' method
> void serialize(Archive& ar, unsigned int version)
> {
> ar & resource_count & content_size;
> ar.write_binary(content, content_size);
> }
>and realized that it won't work for input archives -- so I need to split
>serialization. This looks like overkill for such a simple class. Maybe, a
>better solution would be to introduce 'array' method which
>- takes a pointer and the size of elements
>- is defined for both input and output archieves.
> void serialize(Archive& ar, unsigned int version)
> {
> ar & resource_count & content_size;
> ar.array(content, content_size);
> }
>and it will work for both input and output. (For input, the pointer need to be
>created). Another solution, which is probably clearer, it to define a wrapper
>class c_array, which takes pointer and a size and does the right thing. I'd
>write:
> ar & c_array(content, content_size);
>Surely, it's not 100% required, but would be nice.
There a several possibilities here that might suggested.
a) you idea above
b) arrays are already addressed so that the follownig might work
if count is known at compile time
ar & static_cast<int[size_t] &](*content)
c) override serialize for an int *
....
d) replace read_binary and write_binary with
serialize_binary(Archive ar, void * & t, unsigned int size)
and define an optional splitter for this - I like this idea the best
I'v put off any work with read/write archive for now as I want to
get all the pending stuff absolutly done before I add any more
features. As this is now only implemented for binary archives
its still a little up in the air as to its final form. I was going
to do it sooner but I need some iteratator adaptros for
changing data to base64 and escaped ascii etc. Then I
wanted to convert my old home-made iterator adaptors
to the recently introdude MOAIA* . I finally got that about
done when the load_construct question arose, then the jam
build/test got "fixed" when I wasn't looking so the stack
got deeper faster than I could pop it off. Anyway, I'm
just getting back to a fixed point but a read_binary/write
binary are still unaddressed.
Robert Ramey
*Mother Of All Iterator Adaptors