Hi, I'm using Boost.Serialization on a project where part of the data is not serialized and then loaded separately when unserializing. For instance a class MyThing can have a member data MyThingData* which described some "static" data. There is an application which edits these data and saves them on file for the main application to use latter on. When serializing MyThing we customize save/load in order to serialize MyThingData as a UID (MyThingData has a GetId member function). Upon unserialization the proper MyThingData instance is searched for based on the UID read from the archive. This works OK but is a bit tedious because with class MyThing { ... MyThingData* data_; }; instead of simply doing template< typename Archive > void serialize( Archive& ar, const unsigned int ) { ar & data_; } we have to do something like BOOST_SERIALIZATION_SPLIT_MEMBER() template< typename Archive > void load( Archive& ar, const unsigned int ) { int id; ar >> id; data_ = FindData( id ); // not very important how it is actually retrieved } template< typename Archive > void save( Archive& ar, const unsigned int ) const { ar << data_->GetId(); } Moreover things get even more complicated when serializing for instance a std::vector< MyThingData* > ... So I'm looking for a way to customize the serialization of MyThingData*. Of course I could wrap MyThingData* in a simple object to encapsulate save/load but they're everywhere and the code base is quite massive so this would require a lot of changes. Any idea how I could achieve this ? Thank you ! Regards, MAT.