how to aggregate values for all columns in a table row

[Dave Mason]

Hi,
If anyone has a lot of experience with tables, I could use a bit of 
advice.  Our system currently only has scalar data in the MIBs.  The 
agent exhanges data with the backend server on a per-object basis.  That 
is, each object is individually linked to another object in the backend. 
 We are now considering the addition of tabular data to a MIB.  To avoid 
adding a new interface to the backend to index into a table, I would 
like to aggregate all the object values of a row into one OCTET STRING 
and pass that to the backend.  Each row could be treated as an 
individual object, and only the affected routine in the server would 
need to parse out the columnar values.

My question - is there a "hook" or place in the agent++ classes where I 
can grab a whole row at once?  If the manager does a Set, I need to set 
the columnar objects as before, but before I exit I need to gather all 
the columnar values, concatenate them into one octet string, and pass 
that to the backend.  Likewise, for a Get, I need to read the row object 
from the server, parse and insert the values into the columnar objects, 
then process as usual.  I implemented our existing scalars with a 
subclass of MibLeaf that interacts with the server.  Maybe I can 
subclass MibTableRow?  Even if I can, I'm not sure how I would have the 
toolkit use that class.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,
Dave