How to write a tree structure to disk (VBA with no serialisation)

So I am using VBA (not by choice) to do some fairly non trivial programming and finding it a nightmare. Normally I'd just use serialisation to dump the class/object to disk then read it back in but I cannot do that here, not unless I write my own serialisation function, which is basically what I am asking how to do here.

I have a class

[Node.cls]
Public pictureName As String
Public tagGroup As String

' Collection of Node objects
Public children As New Collection

Public isOverViewScreen As Boolean

' Collections of strings
Public overViewScreenWellNames As New Collection
Public overViewScreenWellType As New Collection
Public overViewScreenOpenPictureName As New Collection

which i开发者_JAVA技巧s basically a node in a tree structure, eg a node with a collection of child nodes which build a tree.

What would be the best way to dump this structure to a flat file and read it in, any hints?

I was thinking I could add a parent link to all of my nodes and just recursively visit the tree in order writing them to a txt file, then read it back in the same way, probably not the most efficient but I have a nice quad core machine here. Is there any simpler or more efficient way to do this?

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Wrote a function that recursively visits the tree and dumps the 'nodes' to a flat text file, I then wrote a function that reads each node back in via a state machine that reads the node line by line recreating the tree, took too long, but it seems to work fine.

Thanks everyone who read it anyway.