Hi,

I have a more fundamental question/inquiry about the serialization library.

What I want to do is to use the serialization library to send classes over a socket. Even though archives are not supposed to be used at streams I figured that it should be possible to create a oarchive on the sender side, create a iarchive on the receiver side, and use these for multiple, successive write / read operations in block mode.

In order to test that assumption I created a test program to see if it would be possible. Here the pseudo code:

void sync_streams(stringstream &os, stringstream& os)

{

// write data from one sting stream to the other

// this emulates sending the data on a socket

int rd_avail = os.tellp() - os.tellg();

os.read(buffer, rd_avail);

is.write(buffer, rd_avail);

}

stringstream os, is;

boost::archive::text_oarchive oa(os);

sync_streams(os, is); // sync preamble

boost::archive::text_iarchive ia(is);

oa << object1;

sync_streams(os, is); // sync object block

ia >> rdObject1;

oa << object2;

sync_streams(os, is); // sync object block

ia >> rdObject2;

While I made this work, I wonder if it is a hack or if this is a valid use case for the serialization library. I looked at the asio projects example/source, there it was done by using a full archive for each object to be transmitted. Sending an archive every time seems a bit expensive too me, since a full preamble is sent everytime and I would loose all the pointer tracking and other great features from the serialization library.

Regards,

Gerd