Pooyan McSporran wrote:
I'm trying to use a combination of the iostreams library and the serialization library in order to be able to serialise objects and send them over a socket.
Sounds reasonable.
I've written a class called "SocketDevice" which implements a bidirectional iostreams instance, and I'm trying to use this with serialization, in particular the binary_oarchive and binary_iarchive archive models.
The problem is that when I do this, the code ends up calling a copy constructor (which doesn't exist) on my SocketDevice class. However I don't want to implement a copy constructor for this class as it doesn't make sense (as it manages a socket and a buffer for that socket, etc).
Currently, except for standard streams and stream buffers, which are given special treatment, Boost.Iostreams fitlers and devices must be copy constructible. (See, e.g., the documentation for the template parameter T here: http://www.boost.org/libs/iostreams/doc/index.html?path=3.3) The standard way to make a device copy constructible is to use shared_ptr; you can see examples by looking at the implementation of file, file_descriptor, and mapped_file. I'm considering adding a storage policy parameter to the stream and stream buffer templates to allow them to store a reference or an owned pointer to a filter or device; this would allow you to do something like this: SocketDevice dev(sock); stream_buffer<SocketDevice, ..., by_ref> buf(dev); or stream_buffer<SocketDevice, ..., by_ptr> buf(new SocketDevice(sock)); Also, I would like to make the following work: SocketDevice dev(sock); filtering_streambuf<bidirectional> str; str.push(boost::ref(sock)); I think I considered these options when I designed the library but was not able to make them work on the full range of supported compilers at the time. Best Regards, -- Jonathan Turkanis CodeRage http://www.coderage.com