I don't know if this helps, but you might want to take a look at the implementation of serialization of variant. Robert Ramey Sebastian.Karlsson@mmorpgs.org wrote:
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