On Subclasses of DeeSerializable Types

As a rule of thumb you need to re-implement the DeeSerializable interface and install parse functions with dee_serializable_register_parser() every time you create a new class derived from a DeeSerializable superclass.

In case a subclass does not provide it's own serialization interface Dee will recurse upwards in the type hierarchy and use the serialization and parser implementations of the first superclass with the required behaviour. This means that the parsed instance will not be an instance of the subclass but only of the serializable superclass. Caveat emptor.

DeeSerializableParseFunc ()

GObject *           (*DeeSerializableParseFunc)         (GVariant *data);

struct DeeSerializableIface

struct DeeSerializableIface {
  GTypeInterface g_iface;

  GVariant*       (*serialize)         (DeeSerializable *self);
};

dee_serializable_register_parser ()

void                dee_serializable_register_parser    (GType type,
                                                         const GVariantType *vtype,
                                                         DeeSerializableParseFunc parse_func);

Register a parser that can convert GVariant data into an instance of a given GType. Note that you can register more than one parser for the same GType provided that you give them different variant type signatures.

If there is already a parser registered for the given type and vtype it will be silently replaced.

The recommended behaviour is that GObject classes register their parsers in their respective class init functions.

dee_serializable_parse ()

GObject *           dee_serializable_parse              (GVariant *data,
                                                         GType type);

Reconstruct a DeeSerializable from GVariant data. For this function to work you need to register a parser with dee_serializable_register_parser(). Any native Dee class will do so automatically.

This method only works on data created with dee_serializable_serialize() and not with data from dee_serializable_externalize().

Since a DeeSerializableParseFunc is not allowed to fail - by contract - it can be guaranteed that this function only returns NULL in case there is no known parser for type and GVariant signature of data.

dee_serializable_parse_external ()

GObject *           dee_serializable_parse_external     (GVariant *data);

Reconstruct a DeeSerializable from GVariant data. For this function to work you need to register a parser with dee_serializable_register_parser(). Any native Dee class will do so automatically.

This method only works on data created with dee_serializable_externalize() and not with data from dee_serializable_serialize().

Since a DeeSerializableParseFunc is not allowed to fail - by contract - it can be guaranteed that this function only returns NULL in case there is no known parser for the GType or GVariant signature of data.

dee_serializable_externalize ()

GVariant *          dee_serializable_externalize        (DeeSerializable *self);

Build an externalized form of self which can be used together with dee_serializable_parse_external() to rebuild a copy of self.

It is important to note that the variant returned from this method does not have the same type signature as returned from a call to dee_serializable_serialize(). Externalization will wrap the serialized data in a container format with versioning information and headers with type information.

dee_serializable_serialize ()

GVariant *          dee_serializable_serialize          (DeeSerializable *self);

Build a clean serialized representation of self. The signature of the returned variant is entirely determined by the underlying implementation. You can recreate a serialized instance by calling dee_serializable_parse() provided that you know the correct GType for the serialized instance.