Hello,

     I need to serialize the docking pane's layout into a CArchive object (e.g. I need to use the classic MFC way of data serialization). However I could not find a way to do this with the support of the XTP Toolkit. I noticed that the layout can only be stored in the system registry. Is there any approach to store the layout in a CArchive? It is really important to serialize the layout this way!

  Thanks to you all :)

Sorry you only can store it to XML node, then to string, then to archive.

BSTR CDockingPaneCtrl::OleSaveStateToString()
{

 MSXML::IXMLDOMDocumentPtr xmlDocPtr = 0;
 MSXML::IXMLDOMElementPtr xmlRootPtr = 0;

 VERIFY(SUCCEEDED(xmlDocPtr.CreateInstance(MSXML::CLSID _DOMDocument)));

 xmlDocPtr->createElement(_bstr_t(_T("Layout")), &xmlRootPtr);
 xmlDocPtr->appendChild(xmlRootPtr, NULL);
 
 if (xmlRootPtr == 0)
  return FALSE;

 CXTPDockingPaneLayout layout(GetDockingPaneManager());
 GetDockingPaneManager()->GetLayout(&layout);

 layout.SaveToNode(xmlDocPtr, xmlRootPtr, _T("Common"));

 BSTR bstrString = NULL;
 xmlRootPtr->get_xml(&bstrString);

 return bstrString;
}
void CDockingPaneCtrl::OleLoadStateFromString(LPCTSTR lpNode)
{

 MSXML::IXMLDOMDocumentPtr xmlDocPtr = 0;
 MSXML::IXMLDOMElementPtr xmlRootPtr = 0;

 VERIFY(SUCCEEDED(xmlDocPtr.CreateInstance(MSXML::CLSID _DOMDocument)));
 
 VARIANT_BOOL bResult;
 HRESULT hr = xmlDocPtr->loadXML(_bstr_t(lpNode), &bResult);
 if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && bResult == VARIANT_TRUE)
 { 
  xmlDocPtr->get_documentElement(&xmlRootPt r);
  if (xmlRootPtr == 0)
   return;

  BSTR bstrRootName = 0;
  if( FAILED(xmlRootPtr->get_nodeName(&bstrRootName))
   || _bstr_t(_T("Layout")) != _bstr_t(bstrRootName))
  {
   if (bstrRootName) SysFreeString(bstrRootName);
   return;
  }
  if (bstrRootName) SysFreeString(bstrRootName);

  CXTPDockingPaneLayout layout(GetDockingPaneManager());

  if (layout.LoadFromNode(xmlDocPtr, xmlRootPtr, _T("Common")))
  {
   GetDockingPaneManager()->SetLayout(& ;layout);
  }
 }
}

Thanks, It worked !

There is one more thing about the serialization problem. I need to support serialization versions. There is a problem when the a future version contains more docking panes than the current one. If I deserialize the old version the new version's docking panes won't be created but they should be available since the new version of the product requires them! Is there a way to "merge" the two layouts so the result contains the union of all docking panes?

No. 

You can serialize your version version  to archive and check it before restore layout.