This sort of question comes up from time to time. On one hand, one has as an archive syntax one wants to target. On the other hand, one's program has a structure of C++ class instances which implement the code. Only by the most fortunate of coincidences are these going to match. There are tools which, given an XML schema will produce matching C++ classes. The serialization system does the opposite. That is, given C++ instances it will produce XML. So this may not be what you want. You might be able to make it work if you craft your C++ data structures with this in mind and/or derived your special archive class. I considered the possibility of automatically generating an XML schema (*.xsd) which would be generated in parallel with the XML output. But it turned out not to be necessary for serialization. But I believe that would permit one to use some other tool to transform the serialization out XML into something more to taste. Robert Ramey Oliver Kullmann wrote:

Hello,

I want to build up a database of timing results, and these timing results should be stored in xml-files.

It seems that the only library in Boost providing xml-functionality is the Serialization library. Now in principle it could work fine: Basically I could create a struct with string tags describing the timing context, and a container with the timing results; via serialisation I write it to an xml-archive, and as additional bonus I also can read it back.

However I have the following concerns:

1. The xml-archives must be human-readable. 2. The xml-archives should be also usable with other xml applications.

Regarding 1., it seems that readability for the current output is kind of alright --- but this doesn't seem to be guaranteed for the future?

Brings me to point 2: It seems that the xml-format is not specified, and thus is a kind of "proprietary file format", changed at will with new releases --- is this the intention, or not?!

To me it would make perfect sense, that at least the xml-archives can be used by other applications, and for that there should be a document type definition (dtd) available for each archive, and furthermore the general structure should be standardised.

But perhaps this is not intended for this library. I would be glad for any comments.

Thanks!

Oliver

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