Archiving Curves to a File
Windows only

by Dale Fugier (Last updated:  Wednesday, December 12, 2018)

Problem

Writing curves to a file has some special considerations. Curves come in many variations: the curve could be a circle, simple curve, or a polycurve. You cannot know in advance what the user will be selecting. As such, the class containing my data declares it as an ON_Curve.

Writing the data is not an issue. You simply call ON_Curve::Write. However, things don’t go so well when you try to read the data. You need a way to simply read curve data without going to a non-abstract class. What is needed is a way to read/write curve data that represents any kind of curve possible.

Solution

It is probably best not to call ON_Curve::Write for this very reason. When serializing anything derived from ON_Object, just use ON_BinaryArchive::WriteObject and ON_BinaryArchive::ReadObject…

Write

static bool WriteCurveFile(FILE* fp, const ON_Curve* curve)
{
  if (nullptr == fp || nullptr == curve)
    return false;

  ON_BinaryFile archive(ON::archive_mode::write3dm, fp);

  int major_version = 1;
  int minor_version = 0;
  bool rc = archive.BeginWrite3dmChunk(TCODE_ANONYMOUS_CHUNK, major_version, minor_version);
  if (!rc)
    return false;

  for (;;)
  {
    // version 1.0 fields
    rc = (archive.WriteObject(curve) ? true : false);
    if (!rc) break;

    // todo...

    break;
  }

  if (!archive.EndWrite3dmChunk())
    rc = false;

  return rc;
}

Read

static bool ReadCurveFile(FILE* fp, ON_Curve*& curve)
{
  if (nullptr == fp)
    return false;

  ON_BinaryFile archive(ON::archive_mode::read3dm, fp);

  int major_version = 0;
  int minor_version = 0;
  bool rc = archive.BeginRead3dmChunk(TCODE_ANONYMOUS_CHUNK, &major_version, &minor_version);
  if (!rc)
    return false;

  for (;;)
  {
    rc = (1 == major_version);
    if (!rc) break;

    // version 1.0 fields
    ON_Object* object = 0;
    rc = (archive.ReadObject(&object) ? true : false);
    if (!rc) break;

    curve = ON_Curve::Cast(object);

    // todo...

    break;
  }

  if (!archive.EndRead3dmChunk())
    rc = false;

  return (rc && curve);
}

Sample

To use the above functions, you could do the following:

bool rc = false;

FILE* fp = ON::OpenFile(filename, L"wb");
if (fp)
{
  rc = WriteCurveFile(fp, curve);
  ON::CloseFile(fp);
}

if (rc)
  RhinoApp().Print(L"Successfully wrote %s.\n", filename);
else
  RhinoApp().Print(L"Errors while writing %s.\n", filename);

and

bool rc = false;
ON_Curve* curve = nullptr;

FILE* fp = ON::OpenFile(filename, L"rb");
if (fp)
{
  rc = ReadCurveFile(fp, curve);
  ON::CloseFile(fp);
}

if (rc)
{
  CRhinoCurveObject* curve_object = new CRhinoCurveObject();
  curve_object->SetCurve(curve);
  context.m_doc.AddObject(curve_object);
  context.m_doc.Redraw();
}
else
{
  RhinoApp().Print(L"Errors while reading %s.\n", filename);
}