Am Thursday 26 November 2009 14:05:18 schrieb Bilokon, Paul:

Hi,

By design Boost Serialization requires the user to list each field that needs to be serialised.

This is in contrast, for example, with Java and some other languages where serialisation is supported (kind of) at the language level.

The current approach requires some code duplication. We have to declare a field. We have to manually (de)serialise it. If we need to make a change, we make it in at least two distinct places.

Is there any way to automate the process of serialisation, perhaps harnessing the power of the preprocessor? E.g. we could label the fields that need to be serialised. Is there anything in Boost that could help?

not that I'm aware of, but I even think that's a good thing. the serialize() function represents a file format, and you want file formats to be stable and not being changed because someone added a runtime field to a class. usually when you do want to add a serialized field you'd also want old versions of the file still to be readable, so you end up writing custom (versioned) deserialization code anyway, even if your language has built-in serialization support. you could use some compile time code generator to write default serialization code for you, using e.g. OpenC++, GCC-XML, or Doxygen, but I doubt those generated functions would stay there very long.