[boost] [serialization+date_time] Serialization Review: serialization of dates

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-04-24 17:37:12

All -

Since I'm the review manager I'm not doing a formal review of the library, but
I thought I'd share some code and a few thoughts.  If serialization is
accepted users people will ask me and other library authors to provide
serialization support for some of the types in their libraries. So to get a
feel for the difficulty of extending serialization for new types I wrote the
serialization code for gregorian::date and some example code to try it out. 
Of course this sort of extension is a critical aspect of the library design
since everyone with a unique type will need to write serialization code.

Overall I felt the docs did a pretty good job of explaining what need to be
done and the code turns out to be reasonably trivial.  Note that the code is
more verbose than required as I did not use all of Robert's macros.  Also,
gregorian::date doesn't currently have a default constructor and hence it is a
more challenging case (as I recall the first submission of the serialization
lib required default constructors).  

When programming with dates and times putting them into collections is quite
common.  Fortunately, one of the most impressive aspects of the current
serialization library is the ability to handle stl collections.  So I was glad
to find (as I expected) that by enabling the serialization of gregorian::date
serialization of collections of date's comes along for free.  

I've attached the code and the serialized file for your reading enjoyment :-)

Jeff