Hi,
It depends on the serialization method. Are you using the Boost Serialization library or one of the Boost.Graph I/O functions like write_graphviz()?
Boost.Serialization.
It's been a while since I looked closely at the graph code, so take this with a grain of salt. Some versions of the adjacency list actually have implicit ids. If you declare the adjacency list with vector storage for vertices, then you can simply create an id property map over the vertices. The reason for this is that vecS causes the vertex descriptor to be the index into the vector, rather than a pointer. For any other vertex storage option, you're on your own.
Interesting, unfortunately I cannot use vecS, since I add/remove a lot, which would render iterators and descriptors invalid with vecS. So it is as I expected - I have to do it manually.
You should probably also steer clear of the older properties (boost::property<>) for graphs. I would recommend defining vertex and edge structures that contain all the features you need for your graph application and then attaching property maps to them. You may end up having to assign your own unique id's (which could actually be strings) , but at least you'll know how it's going to work.
Since the structure and the data types can change at run-time, I defined a map < string, any > as property, so the problem you described doesn't occur. Thanks for the warning, though. regards, Carlos Rafael Giani