Add support for maps/sets in the openSerializer

[Sdusing7]

Currently maps and sets are not supported

[francois-normandin]

@Sdusing7 thanks for the suggestion!

Do you have an example of how you would use this feature if it were added? Are you looking at the flattenedString, ini, or plain text cases in particular?

The base serializer classes are saved in LV2013, which does not support maps and sets. It might be possible to update the Data Manipulation library to be forward-compatible (byte-level marshalling) with sets and maps, but depending on the use case, it might perhaps be better to approach this through the lens of a Serializer.Addon class that supports sets and maps and see if that can be generalized to the base classes. I'm also open to upping the base version to LV2020 if needed.

What do you think?

[Sdusing7]

Hi @francois-normandin. I would want to use the feature to save a cluster of data (which may or may not include maps/sets) to an ini.

Ah, I was wondering if the LV year had something to do with these not being supported. I'll defer to your knowledge of if this can be supported and if so, the best way to do it. My workaround right now is to use the JSONtext vi package and just serialize to JSON since that does support maps/sets.

We've been keeping most of our source code recently in 2020, so that was my initial thought on what would be easiest here. It does inhibit backwards compatibility, but we're also finding most people are using at least LV2020. Probably not universally true, but true enough for our cases and then you at least get access to all data types that current gen LV supports. I'm not sure if you have specific needs to keep the code in 2013, so this may not be an easy option for you

[francois-normandin]

@Sdusing7
Data Manipulation library could support maps and sets by picking directly the bytes in serialized form, but I have to see how much lift this is. Best case scenario would be that it's supported when installed in 2020+, and dead code before that.

If I think the prospect is grim, I'll just upgrade to 2020.

[francois-normandin]

@Sdusing7
Could you upload an example of ini formatted string with a map?

The use case where the map is a dictionary (key is a string) is pretty straightforward, but how is it expected to work with a map of integers<>anything? Is it simply disallowed?

[Sdusing7]

@francois-normandin Here is an example of ini format for a map with integer keys. I'm storing the data as an array of clusters where the cluster has the key/value pairing.

The remaining challenge I think is to figure out how to get all the keys and values indexed from the map once the map is converted to a variant. I'm not seeing any native/primitives to pull the keys or values from a map in the form of a variant, but perhaps there is a way to grab them out of the flattened bytes?

Map.<size(s)> = "2"
Map 0.key = -5
Map 0.value = "apples are good"
Map 1.key = 4
Map 1.value = "bananas are better"

Here's my example code
Map INI serialization.zip

[Sdusing7]

Here is a slight simplification on my logic

Map INI serialization v2.zip