On Sat, Mar 11, 2006 at 11:45:36PM +0200, Peter Dimov wrote:

Carlo Wood wrote:

...

1) WHY does boost::serialization not support serialization of iterators?

It's very hard, if not impossible, in general.

It is either impossible or possible. When it is possible, it can't be hard :p I think that at the moment of serialization, the actual container needs to be known. So, only concentrating on the syntax of the code that serializes an iterator, the following cannot work: ar & iter; However, the container will be known at that point (or at least, we might as well assume that). Therefore, I could imagine a syntax like: ar & foobar(container, iter); where 'foobar' is some template function (that will be part of boost::serialization in the future). Lets start with the last one (have to start somewhere). In order to deserialize the iterator (and taken into account that we already have the container) -- which makes me think that it might be better to pass a functor to operator& above. In other words, (at least for writing), use: template<class Container> struct Foobar { Foobar(Container const&, typename Container::const_iterator& iter) : M_container(container), M_iter(iter); private: Container const& M_container; Container::const_iterator& M_iter; }; and then assign to M_iter, whatever we find in M_container.

If you have access to the container to which the iterator i refers:

a) if the container is a map, you can serialize i->first, then on deserialization look up the key in the map using .find();

b) if the container is a sequence, and it has the same contents on deserialization as it does on serialization, you can serialize the index of the element - distance( c.begin(), i ).

I don't think that it is a requirement that the whole container has to be read: either it's a map or set, in which case later insertions will not invalidate the container, or it is a vector, in which case we use an index, from which we can construct the end iterators before the whole container is reconstructed. Therefore, the following syntax can work imho: ar & FooBar(container, iter); Would you agree? There are a zillion questions and implementation details open - but I'd like to get anyones feedback about this type of interface for iterators before continuing. Current questions: What is a good name for Foobar? Am I right when I think that Foobar needs to be declared in boost::serialization? Now the hard part (for me) is that part that involves the internals of the boost library. At the moment one tries to serialize an iterator, it is possible (though not necessarily) that the object that the iterator points to is already serialized. In the case that we are dealing with an associative container (map or set etc), we don't want to store the contents of the object (or key part, in the case of a map) again: I'd like to just store that once, and store a reference in the archive at the other place. How can I make the library store an object only the first time and the store a reference the second time? This would be for an object of arbitrary type thus. I think that it is only feasible to do this when it's actually the same object (same memory address), which is the case; but while storing the object element of the container, the address of it isn't stored as well, is it? Is there a way to make: std::set<SomeData> s; [...] ar << s; Store the address of s (&s) along with the contents of s? And would that then automatically cause the library to not store that same object again when I do: std::set<SomeData>::iterator iter = s.find(...); [...] ar << *iter; Because then, &*iter would again be the same memory address as what was stored before. -- Carlo Wood