# BamWriter

from pandac.PandaModules import BamWriter

Class : BamWriter
Description : This is the fundamental interface for writing binary objects to a Bam file, to be extracted later by a BamReader.
A Bam file can be thought of as a linear collection of objects. Each object is an instance of a class that inherits, directly or indirectly, from TypedWritable. The objects may include pointers to other objects; the BamWriter automatically manages these (with help from code within each class) and writes all referenced objects to the file in such a way that the pointers may be correctly restored later.
This is the abstract interface and does not specifically deal with disk files, but rather with a DatagramSink of some kind, which simply accepts a linear stream of Datagrams. It is probably written to a disk file, but it might conceivably be streamed directly to a network or some such nonsense.
Bam files are most often used to store scene graphs or subgraphs, and by convention they are given filenames ending in the extension ".bam" when they are used for this purpose. However, a Bam file may store any arbitrary list of TypedWritable objects; in this more general usage, they are given filenames ending in ".boo" to differentiate them from the more common scene graph files.
See also BamFile, which defines a higher-level interface to read and write Bam files on disk.

## Inheritance:

BamWriter:

## Methods of BamWriter:

BamWriter (Constructor)
getFileEndian
getFilename
getFileTextureMode
hasObject
init
setFileTextureMode
writeObject

BamWriter BamWriter::BamWriter(DatagramSink *sink, Filename const &name = ("")); Description:

getFileEndian BamEndian BamWriter::get_file_endian(void) const; Description: Returns the endian preference indicated by the Bam file currently being written. This does not imply that every number is stored using the indicated convention, but individual objects may choose to respect this flag when recording data.

getFilename Filename const &BamWriter::get_filename(void) const; Description: If a BAM is a file, then the BamWriter should contain the name of the file. This enables the writer to convert pathnames in the BAM to relative to the directory containing the BAM.

getFileTextureMode BamTextureMode BamWriter::get_file_texture_mode(void) const; Description: Returns the BamTextureMode preference indicated by the Bam file currently being written. Texture objects written to this Bam file will be encoded according to the specified mode.

hasObject bool BamWriter::has_object(TypedWritable const *obj) const; Description: Returns true if the object has previously been written (or at least requested to be written) to the bam file, or false if we've never heard of it before.

init bool BamWriter::init(void); Description: Initializes the BamWriter prior to writing any objects to its output stream. This includes writing out the Bam header. This returns true if the BamWriter successfully initialized, false otherwise.

setFileTextureMode void BamWriter::set_file_texture_mode(BamTextureMode file_texture_mode); Description: Changes the BamTextureMode preference for the Bam file currently being written. Texture objects written to this Bam file will be encoded according to the specified mode.

writeObject bool BamWriter::write_object(TypedWritable const *obj); Description: Writes a single object to the Bam file, so that the BamReader::read_object() can later correctly restore the object and all its pointers. This implicitly also writes any additional objects this object references (if they haven't already been written), so that pointers may be fully resolved. This may be called repeatedly to write a sequence of objects to the Bam file, but typically (especially for scene graph files, indicated with the .bam extension), only one object is written directly from the Bam file: the root of the scene graph. The remaining objects will all be written recursively by the first object. Returns true if the object is successfully written, false otherwise.