We currently use XML archives with serialization for this, but because of class/type ids etc and other info serialization squirts out, this files can easily be screwed up.
Write SimpleXML Archive and submit it to include in serialization lib. It looks like there is a market for something like that.
I have tried to do just that, see my post copy-pasted from another part of this thread: <snip> I have recently tried to do just this. Not subtracting from the great value of serialization library, it has a nasty habit of polluting XML files it generates with all sorts of magic id numbers that definitly are not human editable or creatable. By creating my own archive class I was able to get rid of most of them, but not all. Some (class-id integers and tracking-id integers) are so inherently embedded in the library that it would require quite an effort to hack them out. To be able to hand-edit XML serialization files, I needed to replace class-id integers with class names (the ones you specify to BOOST_SERIALIZATION_EXPORT macros). Initially I thought it will be easy, but I was wrong. Entire dynamic instantiation mechanism in serialization library seems to depend heavily on these integer ids. It only uses names when class is first seen, and there is not id for it yet. I then tried to use sure-fire method ;-) , which failed as well. Briefly, I made my archive class to generate fake class-ids from class names (in an effort to predict which id would be expected now by serialization). It failed for reasons I cannot recall at the moment - they had something to do with inheritance hierarchies. In case of tracking-ids I just wanted them out, because I do not have duplicate objects in human-created files. On the other hand, I couldn't disable tracking per-class, because I still wanted other archives to do tracking on these objects. A couple of days ago I even posted a question for Robert, and he says that I would need to create my own version of tracking.hpp. So as you can see it is not all roses with serialization library and human readable files. <snip> Best regards, Marcin