Question

Following on from this question, what would be the best way to represent a System.Decimal object in a Protocol Buffer?

Answer 1

Well, protobuf-net will simply handle this for you; it runs off the properties of types, and has full support for decimal. Since there is no direct way of expressing decimal in proto, it won’t (currently) generate a decimal property from a ‘.proto’ file, but it would be a nice tweak to recognise some common type (‘BCL.Decimal’ or similar) and interpret it as decimal.

As for representing it – I had a discussion document on this (now out of date I suspect) in the protobuf-net wiki area; there is now a working version in protobuf-net that simply does it for you.

No doubt Jon and I will hammer this out more later today ;-p

The protobuf-net version of this (in .proto) is something like (from here):

message Decimal {   optional uint64 lo = 1; // the first 64 bits of the underlying value   optional uint32 hi = 2; // the last 32 bis of the underlying value   optional sint32 signScale = 3; // the number of decimal digits, and the sign }