I have developed application for drawing some shapes (lines mostly) , now i need to be able to store sketch to a file, I know that delphi has build in routines for object persistence, but I have never used it.
Can someone tell me can object persistence be used if i have to persist object that have also references to other objects (that will be stored to), I have TLine object which can be connected to other TLine object etc.
Is it better to use this feature or write custom procedure to store/read object to/from file.
One method that I have used in the past is to store my object properties in an XML file writing a custom ‘save’ routine which adds to a passed IXMLNode, and a new constructor which reads from a passed IXMLNode. I store component as a node, and the properties as attributes (unless the property is another object, then it would be a child node).
I believe there are some routines in the Delphi Jedi project which will handle component streaming for you, but I have not used them directly as most of my XML streaming has been done by hand since my objects were extremely simple and could be rendered with only a handful of properties.