Serialising anonymous/immutable types #68

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1. yfakariya commented on Feb 28, 2015

   

   yfakariya

   on Feb 28, 2015

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   In my unstanding, anon types cannot be take away from declaring method, so I cannot imagine use case when anon type serialization is really useful. Would you tell me when and how do you use anon types serialization?
2. drewnoakes commented on Mar 2, 2015

   

   drewnoakes

   on Mar 2, 2015

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   Anonymous classes are regular classes and their type can be known and passed around. This is especially easy when using generic methods:

   public void Log<T>(LogLevel level, T data)
   {
       _serializationContext.GetSerializer<T>()
           .Pack(_logStream, new { Level = level, Data = data });
   }
   

   That's actually pretty close to our use case. The logging API should support arbitrary data from users, so long as it only contains serialisable types. However the anonymous type simply isn't serialisable.

   The problem seems to be that msgpack-cli uses one set of restrictions across both encodable/decodable types. This means types must always have read/write properties in order to work with the lib. This seems like a significant limitation, especially when you use immutability extensively in your code.

   Of course it's not limited to anonymous types:

   public class Foo { public string Name { get; private set; } /*...*/ }
   
   _serializationContext.GetSerializer<Foo>() // bang!
   

   In this case, as with anonymous types, Foo is definitely serialisable, however it is not deserialisable. If There is definitely a strong use-case for treating serialiser and deserialiser types separately.
3. drewnoakes

   changed the title [-]Serialising anonymous types[/-] [+]Serialising anonymous/immutable types[/+] on Mar 2, 2015
4. yfakariya commented on Mar 2, 2015

   

   yfakariya

   on Mar 2, 2015

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   Thank you for great suggestion. I understand that there are use cases that need 'asymmetric' serializer which only available for serialization or deserialization. Although I'm interested in asymmetric serializers feature, I cannot tuckle to it soon because I'm working on another issue.
5. yfakariya

   added

   enhancementRequires or request to feature enhancementRequires or request to feature enhancement

   on Mar 2, 2015
6. drewnoakes commented on Mar 3, 2015

   

   drewnoakes

   on Mar 3, 2015

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   This would certainly be very useful for us. I'm not sure how hard it would be to retrofit this to the current API. I suppose the current serialiser objects could implement both IPacker<T> and IUnpacker<T> or something like that, and then it would also be possible to generate just one or the other:

   _serializationContext.GetPacker<Foo>().Pack(new Foo()); // ok
   
   _serializationContext.GetUnpacker<Foo>().Unpack(new Foo()); // bang!
   
7. yfakariya

   added this to the 0.7.0 milestone on Dec 23, 2015
8. yfakariya

   modified the milestones: future, 0.7.0 on Jul 24, 2016
9. yfakariya

   modified the milestones: 0.9, future on Sep 22, 2016
10. yfakariya

    added a commit that references this issue on Sep 23, 2016

    Implement asymmetric serializers. #68

    ...

    9212817
11. yfakariya commented on Sep 26, 2017

    

    yfakariya

    on Sep 26, 2017

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    This was implemented in 0.9.
12. yfakariya

    closed this as completedon Sep 26, 2017
13. drewnoakes commented on Sep 28, 2017

    

    drewnoakes

    on Sep 28, 2017

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    Great news!