How do you serialize custom data types in Qt applications?

Serializing Data in Qt Applications

In Qt GUI applications, it often becomes necessary to serialize complex data structures for storage or communication. This guide explores Qt's built-in serialization capabilities and provides insights into handling custom data types.

QDataStream: Qt's Serialization Tool

Qt offers QDataStream, a class that handles the serialization of various C and Qt data types. It operates through two overloaded operators, the insertion operator (<<) and the extraction operator (>>). By using these operators, Qt automatically serializes the data into a binary stream.

Customizing Serialization for Custom Types

However, this built-in mechanism may not suffice for custom data types. To enable serialization of such types, Qt allows the overloading of the << and >> operators. Here's an example of creating a custom Painting type and defining the associated serialization operators:

class Painting
{
public:
    ...
private:

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