Re: [Boost-users] [Serialization] Serialization of a derived template class inheriting from a none template base

From: Sebastian.Karlsson_at_[hidden]
Date: 2008-08-07 13:43:06

> Hi,
>
> I'm in the process of trying to get boost::any serializable, and it's
> quite tricky, especially considered my very limited experience with
> boost::serialize. I googled around and found an old discussion on this
> very list, and while interesting no resolution seemed to be found which
> satisfied all the criteria for being commited boost. However, since I'm
> not as picky with data portability, the solution hinted at in:
> http://lists.boost.org/boost-users/2005/09/14266.php seems very
> interesting. The only problem is that I can't see how it would be
> implemented to solve this problem.
>
> It needs to be within the definition of the class to be able for the
> typename to be in scoop, but since the macro seems to expand to a
> definition to be placed in the boost namespace I can't seem to get it
> to play nice.
>
> Any solution which lets me automagicaly serialize boost::any which
> contains serializable types, even if intrusive, would be extremely
> welcomed.

Okay, not much action there. I'll try to paraphrase myself. Is there  
any work being done on trying to solve the underlying problem? I know  
there's other use cases where one usually inherits from a base class  
when doing template classes to be able to store pointers. I'd think it  
would be possible to solve this with making serialize virtual, but  
then you'd have to specialize it for every archive, and well, down  
that road lies mostly ruin.

I'd love to fix this myself, and I do in fact have a couple tricks  
going which at least is better than virtual. Basically having a static  
member which one initialize through a function call which registers  
the type. The only problem is that the serialization library isn't  
really for the faint of heart, there's a lot of trickery pokery. And I  
have no experience with either mpi or template meta programming, so  
it's sadly kind of a large task to tackle for me.

Sorry for being a nuisance but I really want to use boost::serialize,  
and this is a total deal breaker for me. I understand that it's a hard  
problem, and I understand that there's most likely no ideal solution  
found. I'm looking for something which while sub optimal, is as good  
as it currently gets, and is better than making serialize virtual and  
having to specialize it for all possible archive types.

// Sebastian Karlsson