The following tasks involve serializing (that is, reading or writing in serial order) MFC documents and their data to persistent storage. This storage might be a file or some other medium, such as an in-memory file. The data in a document might consist of simple data types, such as integers; of embedded C++ objects; of pointers to C++ objects; or of all three kinds of data.
For a discussion of why MFC supplies a serialization mechanism, see Serialization: Overview and CArchive Tasks.