[Boost-users] Serialization over UDP

Subject: [Boost-users] Serialization over UDP
From: Álvaro Cebrián Juan (acebrianjuan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-06-11 11:58:06

Hello everyone,

I have no prior experience with Boost. I need to serialize an object and
send it over UDP to a remote machine. I already have a completely
functional serialization mechanism over TCP and I would like to convert it
to UDP.

The member function that I use to serialize the objects over TCP looks like
this:

  /// Asynchronously write a data structure to the socket.
>   template <typename T, typename Handler>
>   void async_write(const T& t, Handler handler)
>   {
>     // Serialize the data first so we know how large it is.
>     std::ostringstream archive_stream;
>     boost::archive::text_oarchive archive(archive_stream);
>     archive << t;
>     outbound_data_ = archive_stream.str();
>
>     // Format the header.
>     std::ostringstream header_stream;
>     header_stream << std::setw(header_length)
>       << std::hex << outbound_data_.size();
>     if (!header_stream || header_stream.str().size() != header_length)
>     {
>       // Something went wrong, inform the caller.
>       boost::system::error_code
> error(boost::asio::error::invalid_argument);
>       socket_.get_io_service().post(boost::bind(handler, error));
>       return;
>     }
>     outbound_header_ = header_stream.str();
>
>     // Write the serialized data to the socket. We use "gather-write" to
> send
>     // both the header and the data in a single write operation.
>     std::vector<boost::asio::const_buffer> buffers;
>     buffers.push_back(boost::asio::buffer(outbound_header_));
>     buffers.push_back(boost::asio::buffer(outbound_data_));
>     boost::asio::async_write(socket_, buffers, handler);
>   }
>

As you can see in the code, it makes use of streams to write the serialized
data asynchronously to the remote machine. This is fine for TCP, since this
protocol is stream-oriented.

However, as far as I know, this does not work for UDP because it is
message-oriented and therefore it does not support streams.

Thus, I would be very grateful if someone could shed some light on which
tools does Boost provide that would make serialization feasible over UDP.

Thank you.
Best Regards,

Álvaro