Seeking for advice on implementing a custom renderer

[eiswind]

I have been busy with other stuff, and I checked back on my onix project these days.

I really could use some senior advice with this :)

I created a custom renderer, that renders a simplified version of the onix model with serde::json and utoipa support (it will be part of a http/json interface). the onix model has zillions of value types, and i tried to flatten this monster a little bit.

the simplified model is created by a custom optimizer step.

I started of with the serde renderer, but I found that most of its internals are private. I went on copying tons of functions, that now breaks my neck when trying to update the xsd-parser.

at the end i need some custom serde annotations in the model + the mapping code that converts the simplified model to the xml version and back. is there a better way to handle this other than copying so much from the the private functions?

I'll attach an example of the mess I created, maybe i just got off on the wrong foot here

mapper.txt

[Bergmann89]

Hey @eiswind,

The code you attached already looks quite okay. The code for the different render steps was never intended to be part of the public interface, because it can change heavily depending on changes made to the render step itself. That’s why the only way to implement a similar render step is currently to copy the code.

I tried to improve this a bit by moving parts that are needed in each render step into the DataTypes structures, but there is still a lot of code that is only relevant to a specific render step.

In your particular case, I don’t really see another solution than implementing suitable handler methods for every data type passed to the renderer. Which parts of the private code would you like to reuse? Honestly, I don’t see that much that could be reused, even if the interface were public.

[eiswind]

Hi @Bergmann89 again,

actually I agree when it comes to the mapper. It seems like I forgot to attach the serde-json renderer, which is mostly a (partial) copy from the serde-xml, but with different attributes for serde and utoipa.
I managed to update it over the weekend. Please don't put too much effort in here, as my project is just "I finally can handle Onix correctly." and exercise some rust.

json_renderer.rs

[Bergmann89]

Ah, yes. This makes more sense now :) I have the same problem with the different other serde render steps (quick_xml, serde_xml_rs_v7 and serde_xml_rs_v8). Except a few helper methods, they don't share any common code yet.