Robert Ramey wrote:
James Dennett wrote:
Is there an explicit way to flush the archive before reaching its destructor? Presumably writing output to a stream can cause an exception to be thrown, and we would want to be able to handle such errors rather than hitting terminate().
-- James
There isn't. I'm not sure there should be. It's only needed for xml archives but adding it would require that it be put in all the other archives as a no-op.
Indeed; that's often the cost of polymorphically supporting a wider range of behaviors.
Also "flush" suggests that one could continue using the archive after it was "flushed" like a stream. This would not be case as the function of "flush" would be to finish off the xml data structure.
Fair comment; flush wasn't a suggested name. A better name would be "close".
Ideally what I would like to do is throw an exception in the archive destructor if the stream is still open - but that's not a good idea.
Right, that's the crux of the issues; destructors that do things that can throw are highly problematic, which is an argument for allowing everything that might throw to be moved out of a destructor. Most destructors really ought just to destroy things and release resources; if a destructor does something that can fail, there ought to be a way to try to do that from a named function so that the error can be handled as well as possible. -- James