Re: [boost] Reflection library ?

From: remi.chateauneu_at_[hidden]
Date: 2007-05-12 09:33:58

Dean Michael Berris a écrit :
> On 5/11/07, remi.chateauneu_at_[hidden] <remi.chateauneu_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>   
>>    I would like to know if a library for reflection might be of interest.
>> A first release is available on http://sourceforge.net/projects/crd/ and
>> it uses, as data description, a class which is very close to boost::vector,
>> without explicitely referring to it, for the moment.
>>     
>
> How is this different from something like Boost.Serialization?
>   
Thanks for your interest.

This library does not specifically aim at serialization, but more 
generally at providing for a given class, the list of its members.
Given such a list - a kind of tuple - it is possible to apply algorithms 
which basically iterates over the members of this class. For example:

struct MyClass {
  type1 _Field1 ;
  type2 _Field2 ;
};

SQL queries:
"select <Field1>, <Field2> ... from table etc..."

Comparisons:
x._Field1 == y._Field1 && x._Field2 == y._Field2 ...

Serialization:
std::cout << _Field1 << _Field2 ...

XDR marshalling:
xdr_type1( &xdr, &_Field1 );
xdr_type2( &xdr, &_Field2 );
etc...

Most of these features are implemented and running. It is designed to 
add more 'plugins' of this type - and of course Boost.Serialization is 
worth trying. A class can have as many members list as needed, and does 
not have to be changed because the members lists are different objects. 
The need came out of applications with dozens of business classes, where 
the database persistence routines had to be re-written all the time.

> Do you have more readable documentation about the library?
>   
Unfortunately not for the moment, although the code is short (1100 lines 
in four files, without test programs) and well-documented, with examples.