consul/internal/protohcl/doc.go

77 lines
5.4 KiB
Go

// The protohcl package aims to define a canonical way to translate between
// protobuf and HCL encodings of data.
//
// Similar to google.golang.org/protobuf/encoding/protojson it intends to be
// opinionated about what the canonical HCL representation of a protobuf type
// should be.
//
// As HCL is a user centric data format as opposed to JSON/Protobuf which
// are intended to be used more by machines, efficiency is not a primary goal
// of this package as it is expected that users are either doing the encoding to and
// decoding from HCL at the edge (such as within the Consul CLI) or that even
// when done on servers, the rate that servers perform these translations should
// be low enough to have any inefficiency produce a tangible performance impact.
//
// HCL has two different syntaxes that could be used to represent data: attribute and block
//
// This implementation chooses to represent primitive values, enums and the well known wrapper types and
// collections of these values (maps and repeated fields) with attribute syntax. Other messages and collections
// with message value types will be represented with block syntax for example
//
// message Foo {
// map<string, int32> map_of_ints = 1;
// map<string, OtherMessage> map_of_messages = 2;
// }
//
// would have HCL like:
//
// map_of_ints = {
// "foo": 1,
// "bar": 2,
// }
// map_of_messages "foo" {
// ...other fields
// }
// map_of_messages "bar" {
// ...other fields
// }
//
// Similar goes for list of primitives vs list of messages (except the block syntax uses no labels). The differences
// between primitive fields outside of a collection and a message field really just amounts to not having to specify
// the "=" between the field name and the "{" character.
//
// Field Mapping
// | proto3 | HCL Type | example | notes |
// |------------------------+---------------+---------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
// | message | Object | | Represented as a block |
// | enum | String | | |
// | map<K,V> | Map | | All keys are converted to/from strings. |
// | repeated V | List | | |
// | bool | Bool | | |
// | string | String | | |
// | bytes | base64 String | | |
// | int32, fixed32, uint32 | Number | | |
// | int64, fixed64, uint64 | Number | | |
// | float, double | Number | | |
//
// ----- Well Known Types -----
//
// | Any | Object | | |
// | Timestamp | String | | RFC 3339 compliant |
// | Duration | String | | String form is what would be accepted by time.ParseDuration |
// | Struct | Map | | |
// | Empty | Object | | An object with no fields |
// | BoolValue | Bool | | Mostly the same as a regular bool except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | BytesValue | Bytes | | Mostly the same as a regular bytes except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | StringValue | String | | Mostly the same as a regular string except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | FloatValue | Number | | Mostly the same as a regular float except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | DoubleValue | Number | | Mostly the same as a regular double except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | Int32Value | Number | | Mostly the same as a regular int32 except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | UInt32Value | Number | | Mostly the same as a regular uint32 except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | Int64Value | Number | | Mostly the same as a regular int64 except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | UInt64Value | Number | | Mostly the same as a regular uint64 except null values in the HCL are preserved |
// | FieldMask | String | | Each string of the FieldMask will be joined with a '.' |
//
package protohcl