[elephant-devel] Transient slots in non-persistent objects

[Peter Bengtson]

Hi,

I'm developing a server application in OpenMCL where I'm using Elephant 
to store one single (large) object, read into memory at startup and 
dumped back to the DB at shutdown. Thus, I do not use persistent CLOS 
objects, only standard ones.

The data structure is heavily circular, and contains CLOS objects with 
slots pointing to OS resources, such as sockets. I don't wish to save 
these slots - they are transient.

Is there a way to specify this behaviour? I guess only the serializer 
needs to be modified. It is of course possible work around it with an 
:AROUND method on the slots in question and a special variable which 
will make the accessor functions simply return NIL, but this is kludgy 
and adds unnecessary overhead.

	/ Peter