Crate serde_versions_derive

Serde Versions Derive

serde_versions_derive exports an attribute macro that adds versioning support for structs.

When serializing a named field struct it will automatically add a new field containing the version. It also allows deserializing the versioned type directly back to the unversioned one.

Under the hood this works by creating a new struct that wraps the original struct plus adds a version byte field. Internally this new struct uses #[serde(flatten)] to serialize as expected. The original struct uses #[serde(to, from)] to add the version field when serializing and remove it when deserializing.

usage:

#[version(3)]
#[derive(Clone, Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct S {
    i: i32,
}

This produces the following

#[derive(Clone, Serialize, Deserialize)]
#[serde(into = "_Sv3", from = "_Sv3")]
struct S {
    i: i32,
}
 
#[derive(Clone, Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct _Sv3 {
    version: u8,
    #[serde(flatten)]
    inner: S
}
 
// plus implementations of To, From and to_versioned() for S

Note due to limitations of #[serde(to, from)] this does not support structs with type parameters.

Attribute Macros

version

Generate a new struct with a version field and ensure this struct is converted to that form before serialization.