[boost] Serializing a variant

Hello, I'm looking for a way to serialize a variant. I see two possibly difficult things that I don't know how to accomplish: 1) In order to be able to retrieve a variant from an archive, the type of the value held by the variant must be stored. 2) When retrieving the data from an archive, once the type is read, a value of that type must be extracted from the archive and assigned to the variant. Has anybody tried this before, is this as difficult as it looks? Any help would be greatly appreciated. best regards, Richard Peters