Serde support?

[jacobsvante]

Would be nice to be able to serialize the models. E.g. for displaying purposes.

[bikeshedder]

Yes. That makes an awful lot of sense. I'll add a serde feature. :+1:

[jacobsvante]

Sweet! 😀

[bikeshedder]

I just added serialization support and was wondering if I should use the original Sunspec identifiers for the JSON format or stick with the "rustified" names?

Sunspec

{
    "AID": "...",
    "StVnd": "...",
    "Evt": "GROUND_FAULT | TEST_FAILED",
    "Ctl": "AUTOMATIC",
}

Rust

{
    "aid": "...",
    "st_vnd": "...",
    "evt": "GroundFault | TestFailed",
    "ctl": "Automatic",
}

Personally I prefer the rust style as it's much easier on the eyes and it's just the "default" serialization of an already rustified model definition.

Do you have actual plans for using this?

[jacobsvante]

I agree that it's easier on the eyes. But personally I think serializing/deserializing should use the original names.

Right now my only use case is for printing out to the terminal, for inspection.

[bikeshedder]

You know that the models do support the Debug trait? You can just println!("{model:?}") to get it in a human readable form. And with :#? you even get some nice indentation for easier reading.

btw. bitflags really get serialized like that. I did expecting sth. like "evt": ["GroundFault", "TestFailed"] or "evt": {"GroundFault": true, "TestFailed": true } as that string format is much harder to parse. Maybe bitflags is the wrong data type to begin with. The bitfields in the sunspec models never overlap while bitflags would allow that.

[jacobsvante]

Yes I know! I do think serde_json/yaml output looks a tad prettier though ☺️

Regarding bitflags - does that not work in the other direction?

[bikeshedder]

The bitflags format works in both directions. It's just that it's stringly typed inside the JSON and parsing it with a different language will be a bit annoying. As there are some vendor specific things inside those flags I think it's best to just use it like that and accept the default serialization format bitflags uses.

[jacobsvante]

Okay good! I agree with you that it's not optimal. Feels a bit dirty. But since that's bitflags default approach I think it's best to follow that approach.

[bikeshedder]

Renaming struct fields and enum variants was a no-brainer. Though the bitflags don't seam to support renaming.

In the mean time I'll add serialization with "rustified" names. If anyone needs a JSON format with the actual SunSpec identifiers we need to decide how to serialize Enums and Bitfields. The string format is probably not the best to begin with.

[jacobsvante]

Sounds like a good start!

I would love to see a new release with this as well as tokio-modbus 0.11 support!

[bikeshedder]

I just released the sunspec 0.4.0 crate on crates.io:

• https://crates.io/crates/sunspec/0.4.0

[jacobsvante]

Sweet. Thank you very much for this and for a thoroughly useful library!