Re: [boost] Serialization & XML (was Serialization Library Review)

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-18 12:38:06

At 09:21 AM 11/18/2002, Vladimir Prus wrote:

 >I believe that the biggest problem is that the current library does
 >not have any "begin class serialization"/"end class serialization" hooks,
 >which archive classes can interpret. IOW, you want to surround a
 >serializated
 >class with <something> and </something>, but the library passes only a
 >stream
 >of ints to you arhive class.
 >
 >Some other library (which name I can't remember now, sorry), used 
something
 >like 'describe', and there were explicit 'beginComposite' function.

That was Jens' library.  The version I have supported these hooks (which 
were overridden for specific formats):

   void start_sequence(std::size_t)  { os << "["; }
   void start_sequence_element()     { }
   void separate_sequence_elements() { }
   void end_sequence_element()       { }
   void end_sequence()               { os << "] "; }

   void start_struct()               { os << "{"; }
   void separate_struct_members()    { }
   void end_struct()                 { os << "} "; }

   void start_value()                { }
   void end_value()                  { os << " "; }

Those seemed sufficient for HTML, XML, and other nested data structures in 
addition to various flavors of CSV and similar formats.

--Beman