ojford/recfiles-rs

Manage GNU Recfiles from rust

recfiles & serde_rec

Manage GNU Recfiles from rust.

Installation

recfiles (in-memory recfile handling) & serde_rec (data format for serde) on crates.io.

Usage

use recfiles::Record;
use serde_rec::to_string;

#[derive(Default, Serialize)]
#[serde(rename_all="PascalCase")]
struct Book {
    author: Vec<String>,
    title: String,
    publisher: Option<String>,
}

impl Record for Book {}

let book = Book {
    author: vec![String::from("A.E.J. Eliott, OBE")],
    title: String::from("Thirty Days in the Samarkind Desert with the Duchess of Kent"),
    ..Default::default()
}

let serialised = to_string(&book).unwrap();

assert_eq!(serialised, textwrap::dedent("
    Author: A.E.J. Eliott, OBE
    Title: Thirty Days in the Samarking Desert with the Duchess of Kent

");

We can also specify the record descriptor for 'Book':

let book_descriptor = recfiles::Descriptor {
    name: String::from("Book"),
    key: vec![String::from("Title")],
    allowed: vec![String::from("Publisher"),
}

And serialise a full record set:

let rs = recfiles::RecordSet {
    descriptor: Some(book_descriptor),
    records: vec![book],
}

serde_rec::to_string(&rs);

Work in progress

This is a work in progress, and currently incomplete & poorly documented.

(As of writing, the above's all you're getting 😉.)

Coming...

• Deserialisation
• Deriving descriptors
• File (rather than just to/from string) helpers
• In-memory (not shelling out to recutils) querying helpers
• Docs!

recfiles-rs's Issues

Add query helpers

Implement descriptor derivation

Instead of having to create a descriptor like:

let descriptor = recfiles::Descriptor {
    name: String::from("MyRecordType"),
    // etc.
};

we should be able to derive the basics from a struct that implements Record.

Of course not everything, we can't know what's a %key for example, but we can infer mandatory & allowed fields, and the name.

Add docs/doc tests

Add file helpers

Implement serde_rec::de (deserialisation)

Add methods for sanitising & reading field properties

If a field is mandatory, it doesn't need to be specified as allowed (for example). We should add a method for sanitising such properties of field names into a canonical form.

It can be useful though to know all allowed field names, without having to dig through each property which makes them implicitly allowed. We should have methods for retrieving field names by property (allowed/prohibited/unique/key/mandatory/anything I've forgotten) regardless of whether explicit or implicit.