I’ve seen this error when the “type” that I specify to deserialize to is not the same as the originating type that was serialized. I suppose this could also happen if your object has changed and you’re attempting to deserialize an older version of your object (i.e. old byte array) that is incompatible with the … Read more
The wire format (defined by google – not inside my control!) only sends data for items. It makes no distinction between an empty list and a null list. So if there is no data to send – yes, the length is 0 (it is a very frugal format ;-p). Protocol buffers do not include any … Read more
No it does not; there is no “compression” as such specified in the protobuf spec; however, it does (by default) use “varint encoding” – a variable-length encoding for integer data that means small values use less space; so 0-127 take 1 byte plus the header. Note that varint by itself goes pretty loopy for negative … Read more
You need to use the ProtoInclude attribute on your base class: [ProtoContract] [ProtoInclude(500, typeof(SubClass1 ))] public class BaseClass { The id arg (500 in the above example) should be unique to that class. See this article for more information
This must help you get started with it : Source & Credit & Marc Gravell The simplest way to get started is simply to write your data: class Person { public int Id {get;set;} public string Name {get;set;} public Address Address {get;set;} } class Address { public string Line1 {get;set;} public string Line2 {get;set;} } … Read more
protobuf-net uses a strategy pattern; as needed (once only per type) it uses reflection to look at the types, and builds a set of serializers (based on a common interface) that it can use to serialize and deserialize – so when in use it is just stepping through the known set of serializers. Inside that, … Read more
Good news; what you have described (having existing C# classes) is the expected use-case of protobuf-net. All the .proto stuff (“protogen”, the VS add-in, etc) were all added as afterthoughts. The core of protobuf-net doesn’t know about them or care about them. protocol buffers defines a DSL (.proto, as you mention) that is shared between … Read more
Google designed protobuf to be pretty forgiving with versioning: unexpected data is either stored as “extensions” (making it round-trip safe), or silently dropped, depending on the implementation new fields are generally added as “optional”, meaning that old data can be loaded successfully however: do not renumber fields – that would break existing data you should … Read more
I agree with Jon’s points; if you are coding over multiple environments, then his version gives you a similar API to the other “core” implementations. protobuf-net is much more similar to how most of the .NET serializers are implemented, so is more familiar (IMO) to .NET devs. And as Jon notes – the raw binary … Read more
First thing to check: IS THE INPUT DATA PROTOBUF DATA? If you try and parse another format (json, xml, csv, binary-formatter), or simply broken data (an “internal server error” html placeholder text page, for example), then it won’t work. What is a wire-type? It is a 3-bit flag that tells it (in broad terms; it … Read more