Re: Serializing objects derived from GObject to XML

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 17:50 +0200, Jacob Kroon wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm looking for a way to serialize GObject-derived classes into XML. I'm
> basically writing a block-diagram editor, similar to Simulink/Matlab,
> where I have a Diagram class, and diff. block classes, and I'd like to
> be able to save the diagrams to a file, so my idea is to implement a way
> to serialize the blocks and the diagram. All interesting attributes are
> implemented as GObject attributes, so if I can could implement
> block_to_xml() and diagram_to_xml() functions, things would work out
> nicely I think. Of course I would have to go the other way too, when
> loading diagrams, xml_to_block() and xml_to_diagram().
> 
> The trouble is I don't really know where to start, is this something
> that has been documented elsewhere, or does anyone know of some example
> code or ideas I could look into?
> 
> My initial idea is to implement some sort of GObject serializer, which
> outputs the classname, and the same for all properties the GObject has
> registered.
> 
> Any comments would be most welcome!

You can iterate over the properties. The get_properties() function here
does that, after instantiating an object of a particular type
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/glibmm/tools/extra_defs_gen/generate_extra_defs.cc?view=markup

You would just need to add some code to get the values of a specified
instance.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com