CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++xmlserializationintrospection
abigagli
abigagli

Reputation: 2809

Accessing stored structures for which I have an xml description

I have set up a sort of introspection-enabling C++ library that allows, using minimum macros and a fair amount of template trickery, to declare structures and classes that get enriched with some meta-information.

This meta-information captures all important details about each field of the struct/class that you declare, and at the end of the story you are able, for each struct/class enriched in this way, to produce an xml file that dumps, for each field, its name,type,len,offset etc. etc.

For my problem, I don't need to support fields that are pointers, but only primitive types, arrays and STL containers (vectors, lists etc.)

The code that populates these meta-enriched structs/classes (the "producer"), at a certain point serializes them (for now it's a simple binary dump of all primitive types and of all the "buffers" used by the STL containers, if any).

Now I need to start developing a "reader" counterpart that is able at runtime, starting from the xml description that has been built by the "producer", to access the various fields of the stored data.

I think it's a problem of dynamic data-dictionary interpretation, but all that I have found up to know is related to read back xml data, while I have binary data and an xml description of it...

What is the best way to start on this? Is something out there that resembles this problem and that I could get inspiration from?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 181

Answers (2)

kosmovich
kosmovich

Reputation:

/* smarc's keeping it simple */

  class xmlstream
  {
  ...
  };

  class ibase
  {
  void read( xmlstream& rStream ) = 0;
  void write( xmlstream& rStream ) = 0;
  };

  class classfactory
  {
  void produce( xmlstream& rStream );
  void consume( xmlstream& rStream );  
  ibase* create( xmlstream& rStream );
  void destroy( ibase* pBase );
  };

  class class1 : public ibase
  {
  static class1* create( );
  static void    destroy( class1* pObject );
  void read( xmlstream& rStream );
  void write( xmlstream& rStream );
  };

  class class2 : public ibase
  {
  static class1* create( );
  static void    destroy( class1* pObject );
  void read( xmlstream& rStream );
  void write( xmlstream& rStream );
  };

Let me if this isn't clear.

Upvotes: 1

lothar
lothar

Reputation: 20237

Did you have a look at Boost Serialization? It pretty much does what you ask for.

Upvotes: 0

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