[Boost-users] [serialization] How to deal with bit fields?

10 Sep 2008

      Hello,

I am a new user of the serialization library and find it is a very comfortable solution. But I met a problem concerning the serialization of bit fields. For example, look at the following:

struct A
{
    int a : 1;
    int b : 7;
};

Serialization using the following code does not work, because bitfields can not be passed by reference.

template<class Archive>
void serialize(Archive& ar, A& theA, const unsigned int version)
{
    ar & make_nvp("a", theA.a);
    ar & make_nvp("b", theA.b);
}

So, I use this workaround:

template<class Archive>
void serialize(Archive& ar, A& theA.a, const unsigned int version)
{
    bool myA;
    int myB;
    if (!Archive::is_loading::value)
    {
        myA = (theA.a == 1);
        myB = theA.b;
    }
    ar & make_nvp("a", myA);
    ar & make_nvp("b", myB);
    if (Archive::is_loading::value)
    {
        theA.a = myA ? 1 : 0;
        theA.b = myB;
    }
}

Do you have any suggestions how a more elegant solution could look like?

Thanks and bye,
Sebastian Knopp