Saving and reading

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The manager provides facilities to save its contents to a file. The resulting file is an ASCII or binary file in the .ivl format that contains information about the layers and the graphic objects.

The saving methods are as follows:

void write(OutputStream stream, boolean binary) throws IOException

void write(String filename) throws IOException

void write(String filename, boolean binary) throws IOException

You can save data in either an ASCII or a binary file, the binary format being more compact and faster to read than the ASCII format.

The loading methods are as follows:

void read(InputStream stream) throws IOException, IlvReadFileException

void read(String filename) throws IOException, IlvReadFileException

void read(URL url) throws IOException, IlvReadFileException

The read methods may throw an exception in the following situations:

The file is not an .ivl file.
The .ivl format is not correct.
A graphic class cannot be found.

The read methods detect automatically whether the .ivl file is an ASCII or a binary file.

You can save/read the information about your own graphic objects by providing the appropriate methods when creating your own graphic object class. For more information, see Input/output operations and also Saving and loading the object description.

Important

The recommended way to serialize any IlvManager object is through IVL serialization and not Java™ serialization. Serialization cannot work for managers that contain graphic objects such as IlvIcon or some other classes, since these classes manage internally Java SE objects that are not serializable.

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