Question

I am building a framework for my day-to-day tasks. I am programming in scala using a lot of type parameter.

Now my goal is to save datastructures to files (e.g. xml files). But I realized that it is not possible using xml files. As I am new to this kind of problem I am asking:

Is there a way to store the types of my datastructures in a file??? Is there a way in scala???

Answer 1

Okay guys. You did a great job basicly by naming the thing I searched for.

Its serialization.

With this in mind I searched the web and was completly astonished by this feature of java.
Now I do something like:

object Serialize {

  def write[A](o: A): Array[Byte] = {
    val ba = new java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream(512)
    val out = new java.io.ObjectOutputStream(ba)
    out.writeObject(o)
    out.close()
    ba.toByteArray()
  }

  def read[A](buffer: Array[Byte]): A = {
    val in = new java.io.ObjectInputStream(new java.io.ByteArrayInputStream(buffer))
    in.readObject().asInstanceOf[A]
  }
}

The resulting Byte-Arrays can be written to a file and everthing works well.

And I am totaly fine that this solution is not human readable. If my mind changes someday. There are JSON-parser allover the web.