Serialization

Release Notes

Requirements
Installation
Platforms
Differences from Draft #18
Pending Issues

This is Draft #19 of a proposed Boost Serialization Library. There are currently no known bugs. This library has been tested with Boost version 1.31.0 as of 11 April 2004.

Requirements

This library requires Boost version 1.31 or later. Depending on the compiler used, It may also require spirit 1.6 which is not part of the standard boost distribution.

The installation procedure presumes that the following programs are in your current path

bjam
process_jam_log
compiler_status

If these are not built or not in the current path, make required adjustments. The programs are part of the boost tools/regression directory and can be built there if necessary.

I also recommend testing the regression system with the following procedure:

change current directory to BOOST_ROOT/tools/regression/test. (where BOOST_ROOT is your boost root directory)
invoke runtest.bat (on an Windoz system) or runtest.sh or runtest.ksh on other systems.
if necessary, you can invoke the commands in runtest.bat one by one from the command line.
when finished you should have an html file with a set of test results.
review the bjam.log to be sure that the results match the table. If they don't, advise the boost build mailing list.

The serialization library requires the boost spirit package to load XML archives. We have found that all tests pass using spirit 1.6x. Spirit 1.8 does not work with older compilers - specificallly MSVC 6 and Borland. If you are using one of these two compilers, you may download a version of spirit 1.6 here. To use this downloaded version rather than the one included with boost, set an environmental variable SPIRIT_ROOT to be equal to the root directory where the downloaded copy of spirit has been placed. E. G.


set SPIRIT_ROOT=c:/spirit161

If you're not using bjam and the jamfile to build the library, be sure that the directory which contains the version of spirit you plan to use is placed at the front of the list of include paths.

Installation

I use the following procedure for building and testing this library:

Unzip the serialization19.zip file to an empty directory. (If you're reading this you probably have already done this.)
Copy the files in this library into the corresponding sub directories your local boost directory tree.
Set current directory to the boost-root/libs/serialization/test.
Invoke runtest <toolset> <boost root directory> for the toolset you use. (E.G. vc7, GCC, etc.) This will build the required libraries then run all the tests.
There now should exist an updated file compiler_status.html

Note that this will build only those libraries required to build and execute the tests. If the above completes successfully and you want to start using the serialization library in your own projects, You can build all the variations of the library:

Change the current directory to boost-root/libs/serialization/build.
Invoke bjam -sTOOLS=<toolset>

This will build debug and release versions of libboost_serialization.lib. If your build platform supports wide character i/o, debug and release versions of libboost_wserialization.lib will also be built. All applications which use serialization should be linked with the former. Applications which use wide character i/o should be linked with both.

Similarly, to build the examples:

Change the current directory to boost-root/libs/serialization/example.
Invoke bjam -sTOOLS=<toolset>

Platforms

This library has been built and tested for debug and release modes on VC++ 6.0, VC 7.0, GCC 3.3, and Intel 8.0. Some less conforming compilers fail some tests. Details are available in the implementation notes.

Differences from Draft #18

Reorganization of header and template file
Enhanced documentation to help explain implementation issues.
Adjustments to improve support for less conformant compilers.
Introduction of polymorphic pointers.
A few bug fixes.

Pending issues

Compile, and test on more platforms
implement is_virtual_base<T> to automatically eliminate redundancy in virtual base class serialization.
currently can't serialize through a pointer an object a of class that implements its own new/delete operators.

Revised 29 February, 2004