Is it possible to save a record to a XML file without saving the fields separately?

Question

I have a big record which is consist of many fields with different types and also dynamic arrays. I want to save it to a file and then read it back. Imagine this simple record:

TCustomRecord = Record
   Field1 : array of integer;
   Field2  : Integer;
   Field3 : String;
end;

Normally I have to use something like this to save this record to a file:

var
   f : File of TCustomRecord;
   cr : TCustomeRecord;
 begin
   Write(f, cr);
 end;

But it doesn't work because of dynamic array and string type.

So the question is:

Is there a way to save (export) it to a TXMLDocument without going through all the fields? (I mean adding field-by-field using addChild())

Answer 1

Your XML library obviously needs to know what the fields' values are, or else it cannot serialize them, so you're going to have to go "through all the fields" at some point. Whether you do it manually or have some way of traversing your data structure automatically (like with RTTI) makes no difference. Something has to look at all the fields.