Setting chart appearance from an external source?

[XTP 15.1.3]

Hi,

Am I missing something or there is no way to do chart appearance serialization to a string and back?

CXTPChartAppearance::LoadAppearance() seems to be accepting only a resource ID, implying that the appearance data must be a resource.

Internally, CXTPChartAppearance::LoadFromResource delegates the actual deserialization work to CXTPPropExchangeXMLNode. CXTPPropExchangeXMLNode itself does have a number of LoadXXX methods so apparently it can load content from a string or a file. Unfortunately, these methods are not exposed through CXTPChartAppearance anyhow.

I was thinking about deriving from CXTPChartAppearance and re-implementing LoadAppearance so that it calls CXTPPropExchangeXMLNode::LoadFromString instead of CXTPPropExchangeXMLNode::LoadFromResource. However, that would not be enough. Even if I had my derived instance, CXTPChartContent would not allow me to set that instance on it. I would then need to go through the hassle of deriving from CXTPChartContent too, only to be able to inject my own appearance.

Is there a simpler way to achieve serialization/deserialization to a string?

Thanks in advance.

[Update]
I just realized that deriving won't work, LoadFromResource is not virtual. Besides, hijacking LoadFromResource to load from an external string would already be a hack...