From: Gennadiy Rozental (gennadiy.rozental_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-21 22:02:45
"Marcin Kalicinski" <kalita_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:e2bho8$c7e$1_at_sea.gmane.org...
>> Use Serialization lib for this.
>>
>>> But some values are also only human editable (not on the system setup
>>> display etc) so simple XML based files work well because they can easily
>>> be read/written by a person and the software itself.
>>
>> There many ways to deal with it. For example you could keep these fields
>> as strings in memory or use separate storage for them or teach
>> boost::serialization to save/load them.
>
> I have recently tried to do just this. Not subtracting from the great
> value of serialization library, it has a nasty habit of polluting XML
> files it generates with all sorts of magic id numbers that definitly are
> not human editable or creatable. By creating my own archive class I was
> able to get rid of most of them, but not all. Some (class-id integers and
> tracking-id integers) are so inherently embedded in the library that it
> would require quite an effort to hack them out.
>
> To be able to hand-edit XML serialization files, I needed to replace
> class-id integers with class names (the ones you specify to
> BOOST_SERIALIZATION_EXPORT macros). Initially I thought it will be easy,
> but I was wrong. Entire dynamic instantiation mechanism in serialization
> library seems to depend heavily on these integer ids. It only uses names
> when class is first seen, and there is not id for it yet. I then tried to
> use sure-fire method ;-) , which failed as well. Briefly, I made my
> archive class to generate fake class-ids from class names (in an effort to
> predict which id would be expected now by serialization). It failed for
> reasons I cannot recall at the moment - they had something to do with
> inheritance hierarchies.
>
> In case of tracking-ids I just wanted them out, because I do not have
> duplicate objects in human-created files. On the other hand, I couldn't
> disable tracking per-class, because I still wanted other archives to do
> tracking on these objects. A couple of days ago I even posted a question
> for Robert, and he says that I would need to create my own version of
> tracking.hpp.
>
> So as you can see it is not all roses with serialization library and human
> readable files.
Well you need to bring it all to the Robert attention. Boost serialization
should support wide variety of archives, including simple xml.
Gennadiy