How can I use an external property map with an adjacency list which uses a setS for the vertex list? I got property maps (with arrays as storage for the property values) working fine with a vecS adjacency list, but I can't seem to get them to work after changing the template to setS. I understand the reason is lack of automatic indexing, but don't know how to get around that. Using set/map for storage of property values would most convenient for me.
On a similar note, perhaps it's possible to use a map to store the vertices, mapping ints to Vertex descriptors? (that was the original custom implementation of graph class which I'm porting to BGL).
Not easily :) [Why do all of my responses seem to start this way?]
Your solution is actually pretty close to correct, although you should prefer to use an unordered_map to retain constant time lookups. There are two parts to a property map: the container and the map. The container actually implements the mapping and the (property) map abstracts it to the syntax required by the BGL algorithms. For example, you might have:
typedef unordered_map<Vertex, int> IdMap;
typedef associative_property_map<IdMap> IdPropMap;
IdMap ids(num_vertices(g));
IdPropMap idmap(ids)
foreach(v, vertices(g)) { // Probably won't work
put(idmap, v, i++)
}