// Copyright (C) 2022 The Qt Company Ltd.
// SPDX-License-Identifier: LicenseRef-Qt-Commercial OR GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only

/*!
    \page qtserialization.html
    \title Qt Serialization
    \brief Serializations provided by Qt API

    The purpose of serialization is to save the state of an object to be able to
    recreate it when needed. It allows you to perform actions like:

    \list
        \li Sending the object to a remote application by using a web service
        \li Passing the object as a JSON or XML string
        \li Saving and restoring user information or sharing it across applications
    \endlist

    The Qt API provides support for serialization for several use cases:

    \list
    \li \l JSON support in Qt provides an easy to use C++ API to parse, modify
           and save JSON data. \l {CBOR} {CBOR Support in Qt} is a compact form
           of binary data encoding that is a superset of JSON.
    \li \l QDataStream provides serialization of binary data to a QIODevice
    \li \l {Qt XML C++ Classes} provide C++ implementations of the \l XML Streaming
           and DOM standards for XML
    \li \l CBOR is Qt's implementation for the CBOR serialization format.
    \li \l QSettings provides a way of serializing and storing platform independent
           application settings.
    \endlist

    \section1 Advantages of JSON and CBOR

    When you use \l JSON information is stored in a QJsonObject and a QJsonDocument
    takes care to stream values into a QByteArray.

    For example
    \code
        QJsonObject jobject;
        jobject["SensorID"] = m_id;
        jobject["AmbientTemperature"] = m_ambientTemperature;
        jobject["ObjectTemperature"] = m_objectTemperature;
        jobject["AccelerometerX"] = m_accelerometerX;
        jobject["AccelerometerY"] = m_accelerometerY;
        jobject["AccelerometerZ"] = m_accelerometerZ;
        jobject["Altitude"] = m_altitude;
        jobject["Light"] = m_light;
        jobject["Humidity"] = m_humidity;
        QJsonDocument doc( jobject );

        return doc.toJson();
    \endcode

    JSON has several advantages:

    \list
    \li Textual JSON is declarative, which makes it readable to humans
    \li The information is structured
    \li Exchanging generic information is easy
    \li JSON allows extending messages with additional values
    \li Many solutions exist to receive and parse JSON in cloud-based solutions
    \endlist

    \l CBOR is the Concise Binary Object Representation, a very compact form of
    binary data encoding that is a superset of JSON. It was created by the IETF
    Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE) WG, which has been used in many new
    RFCs. CBOR shares many of the advantages of JSON, but sacrifices human
    readability for compactness.

    \section1 Advantages of QDataStream Classes

    \l QDataStream is a viable option when the whole flow of data is determined
    and not about to change. In addition, both the reader and the writer of the
    data must be written in Qt.

    Adding support for this to a class requires two additional operators.
    For example, for a class named SensorInformation:

    \code
    QDataStream &operator<<(QDataStream &, const SensorInformation &);
    QDataStream &operator>>(QDataStream &, SensorInformation &);
    \endcode

    The implementation for the serialization is shown below:

    \code
    QDataStream &operator<<(QDataStream &out, const SensorInformation &item)
    {
        QDataStream::FloatingPointPrecision prev = out.floatingPointPrecision();
        out.setFloatingPointPrecision(QDataStream::DoublePrecision);
        out << item.m_id
            << item.m_ambientTemperature
            << item.m_objectTemperature
            << item.m_accelerometerX
            << item.m_accelerometerY
            << item.m_accelerometerZ
            << item.m_altitude
            << item.m_light
            << item.m_humidity;
        out.setFloatingPointPrecision(prev);
        return out;
    }
    \endcode

    Deserialization works similarly, but using the \c {>>} operator.
    For example, \c {out >> item.m_id}, and so on.

    Usually, using QDataStream is faster than using textual JSON.

    \section1 Advantages of Qt XML C++ Classes

    Qt provides the QDomDocument class that represents the XML document and
    two classes for reading and writing the XML through a simple streaming API:
    QXmlStreamReader and QXmlStreamWriter.

    QDomDocument class represents the entire XML document. It is the root of the
    document tree and provides primary access to the document's data.

    A stream reader reports an XML document as a stream of tokens. This differs
    from SAX as SAX applications provide handlers to receive XML events from the
    parser, whereas the QXmlStreamReader drives the loop, pulling tokens from the
    reader when they are needed. This pulling approach makes it possible to build
    recursive descent parsers, allowing XML parsing code to be split into
    different methods or classes.

    QXmlStreamReader a parser for well-formed XML 1.0, excluding external parsed
    entities. Hence, data provided to the stream reader adheres to the
    W3C's criteria for well-formed XML, or an error will be raised. Functions
    such as \c atEnd(), \c error(), and \c hasError() can be used to test  for
    such errors and obtain a description of them.

    The QXmlStreamWriter is a streaming API that takes care of prefixing namespaces,
    when the namespaceUri is specified when writing elements or attributes.

    \section1 Classes that provide serialization

    \annotatedlist qtserialization
*/
