Software Engineering and Computer Games

Chapter 29. Serialization

In this chapter we’re going to talk about how to save information about your current document’s data, and how to read that kind of information back in. This process used to be called file handling, but these days it’s called serialization. To serialize a document means either to write it to a file, or to read information into it from a file. The word ‘serialize’ is used to express the notion that we are converting a complicated data object into a simple series, or sequence, of 0s and 1s.

The MFC framework makes it exceedingly easy to open and save files. One good thing is that the work of finding the file names is already done for us. The presupplied File Open and File Save dialog boxes are examples of what are called ...