cereal::specialize< Archive, T, S > Struct Template Reference

A class used to disambiguate cases where cereal cannot detect a unique way of serializing a class. More...

#include </home/shane/workspace/cereal/include/cereal/specialize.hpp>

Inheritance diagram for cereal::specialize< Archive, T, S >:

Related Functions
(Note that these are not member functions.)
enum	specialization

Detailed Description

template<class Archive, class T, specialization S>
struct cereal::specialize< Archive, T, S >

A class used to disambiguate cases where cereal cannot detect a unique way of serializing a class.

cereal attempts to figure out which method of serialization (member vs. non-member serialize or load/save pair) at compile time. If for some reason cereal cannot find a non-ambiguous way of serializing a type, it will produce a static assertion complaining about this.

This can happen because you have both a serialize and load/save pair, or even because a base class has a serialize (public or private with friend access) and a derived class does not overwrite this due to choosing some other serialization type.

Specializing this class will tell cereal to explicitly use the serialization type you specify and it will not complain about ambiguity in its compile time selection. However, if cereal detects an ambiguity in specializations, it will continue to issue a static assertion.

class MyParent
{
  friend class cereal::access;
  template <class Archive>
  void serialize( Archive & ar ) {}
};
 
// Although serialize is private in MyParent, to cereal::access it will look public,
// even through MyDerived
class MyDerived : public MyParent
{
  public:
    template <class Archive>
    void load( Archive & ar ) {}
 
    template <class Archive>
    void save( Archive & ar ) {}
};
 
// The load/save pair in MyDerived is ambiguous because serialize in MyParent can
// be accessed from cereal::access.  This looks the same as making serialize public
// in MyParent, making it seem as though MyDerived has both a serialize and a load/save pair.
// cereal will complain about this at compile time unless we disambiguate:
 
namespace cereal
{
  // This struct specialization will tell cereal which is the right way to serialize the ambiguity
  template <class Archive> struct specialize<Archive, MyDerived, cereal::specialization::member_load_save> {};
 
  // If we only had a disambiguation for a specific archive type, it would look something like this
  template <> struct specialize<cereal::BinaryOutputArchive, MyDerived, cereal::specialization::member_load_save> {};
}

You can also choose to use the macros CEREAL_SPECIALIZE_FOR_ALL_ARCHIVES or CEREAL_SPECIALIZE_FOR_ARCHIVE if you want to type a little bit less.

Template Parameters

T	The type to specialize the serialization for
S	The specialization type to use for T

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The documentation for this struct was generated from the following file:

• specialize.hpp