Sequence without array notation in query string

[glademiller]

As documented the following works

use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};
use serde_qs;
#[derive(Debug, Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct QueryThing {
    things: Vec<String>,
}

fn main() {
    let qs = "things[]=1&things[]=2";
    let f: QueryThing = serde_qs::from_str(qs).expect("Could not deserialize");
    println!("{:?}", f);
}

I would expect the following to work as well this form is one supported by open api

use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};
use serde_qs;
#[derive(Debug, Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct QueryThing {
    things: Vec<String>,
}

fn main() {
    let qs = "things=1&things=2";
    let f: QueryThing = serde_qs::from_str(qs).expect("Could not deserialize");
    println!("{:?}", f);
}

open api examples can be found here https://swagger.io/docs/specification/serialization/

[samscott89]

Hey! Thanks for the suggestion. I'd love to have an actual specification to conform to. It always bothered me that this lib was based on an informal usage routed in rails.

Unfortunately, I don't think it makes sense to make this happen for this library. The code for this crate is all about nested structs from square bracket values. The open api stuff seems to be trying to avoid precisely that (with the deepObject style being the odd one out).

In practice this means supporting those other formats would be (a) a bit unwieldy for this crate and (b) this crate would be an inefficient way to handle them.

Without wanting to go into too many details, a load of the complexity in this crate is basically recreating a tree structure. Which makes the crate pretty inefficient, since it needs two passes over the data, and basically clones a lot of it. The openapi one would remove a lot of this.

I think a separate library for the openapi format would be ideal. And I'd be happy to help someone, either yourself or someone else, with building something like that. Though I don't think there would be much from this lib which would be useful. Other than the parts already borrowed from serde_urlencoded!

Apologies if you were hoping for something to work out of the box! You might get something working by using serde_urlencoded, and then collecting values with matching tags into a vector for example?

[glademiller]

That makes a lot of sense thanks for the feedback. Looking at the documentation in this libraries source code I did get the sense that in order to support this there might be some architectural differences. I'm not sure when I'll get to it but at some point my current project will need to be able to deserialize this format so I may reach out at that point to get a helping hand.

Cheers and thanks again.