Re: [Boost-users] Serialization of dynamic data

1 Feb 2007

      Your solution below would likely work.  These days I would expect find
the T* / size pair replaced with something like std::vector tarray
in which case you could have just used:

ar & tarray

But you're solution is a natural way to proceed under the circumstances.

BUT - it presumes that T can be serialized as a binary which is not
portable and not generally true.

A general solution would be to use a loop which

...
ar & t[i]

For examples, look at the implementation of serialization for collections
as included in the library.

Robert Ramey

Anders Sundman wrote:
...
Ok, my bad. I've found the docs:
http://www.boost.org/libs/serialization/doc/serialization.html#splitting
But the general question remains, what to do with dynamic data?
It's often the case that I find a T* and a size in classes. I've been
thinking about introducing some kind of convenience functions for
this. Perhaps something along these lines:
template
void saveBuf(Archive & ar, const T * buf, size_t size) {
bool isNull = (buf == 0);
ar << size;
ar << isNull;
if (!isNull)
ar.save_binary(buf, size * sizeof(T));
}
template
void loadBuf(Archive & ar, T *& buf, size_t & size) {
bool isNull;
ar >> size;
ar >> isNull;
if (buf != 0) {
delete buf;
buf = 0;
}
if(!isNull) {
buf = new T[size];
ar.load_binary(buf, size * sizeof(T));
}
else {
buf = 0;
}
}
What do you thing about that? Any obvious problems? Are there perhaps
already something like this in the library?
// Anders Sundman