Serialization with Qt

QDataStream handles a variety of C++ and Qt data types. The complete list is available at http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/datastreamformat.html. We can also add support for our own custom types by overloading the << and >> operators. Here's the definition of a custom data type that can be used with QDataStream:

class Painting
{
public:
    Painting() { myYear = 0; }
    Painting(const QString &title, const QString &artist, int year) {
        myTitle = title;
        myArtist = artist;
        myYear = year;
    }
    void setTitle(const QString &title) { myTitle = title; }
    QString title() const { return myTitle; }
    ...
private:
    QString myTitle;
    QString myArtist;
    int myYear;
};
QDataStream &operator<<(QDataStream &out, const Painting &painting);
QDataStream &operator>>(QDataStream &in, Painting &painting);

Here's how we would implement the << operator:

QDataStream &operator<<(QDataStream &out, const Painting &painting)
{
    out << painting.title() << painting.artist()
        << quint32(painting.year());
    return out;
}

To output a Painting, we simply output two QStrings and a quint32. At the end of the function, we return the stream. This is a common C++ idiom that allows us to use a chain of << operators with an output stream. For example:

out << painting1 << painting2 << painting3;

The implementation of operator>>() is similar to that of operator<<():

QDataStream &operator>>(QDataStream &in, Painting &painting)
{
    QString title;
    QString artist;
    quint32 year;
    in >> title >> artist >> year;
    painting = Painting(title, artist, year);
    return in;
}

This is from: C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 By Jasmin Blanchette, Mark Summerfield