Load/Save COMPLEX User Defined Types ? (with Enums and subTypes) - Anyone know how?

[Schmidt]

Not really life threatening, just wanted to know if anyone has found a general method to load and save complex UDTs.

I have seen a few articles explaining the internals of simple UDTs and to load/save simple UDTs.

However - enums, sub-types, and sub-arrays in a UDT are not handled.

Interested in seeing how difficult a generic method to handle such an task would be.

Not sure, where you got the information that "enums, sub-types and sub-arrays" are not handled properly whilst loading/saving a VB-UDT.

I mean, it cannot get any easier than this here:

Sub WriteMyComplexUDT(FileName As String, T As MyComplexUDT)
Dim FNr As Long
  FNr = FreeFile
  Open FileName For Binary As FNr
    Put FNr, , T
  Close FNr
End Sub

That's all you need, to write the current contents of even very deep nested UDTs (containing Enums, Strings and all kind of static or dynamic arrays) to disk "in one go".

Edit (2013-07-30):
The sentence above is wrong with regards to UDT-Members which are Enum-Types, sorry about that
- the rest (static or also dynamic Strings and all kind of static or dynamic arrays) remains true still
- for the sake of completeness: Object or Class-Types are not supported by the serializer (neither standalone, nor as Arrays)


Read direction is following the same principle - only use Get instead of Put.

Olaf