structureless loaders

[Warpten]

Steps needed

• Separate loading logic from parsing logic
• Provide front-facing code that hides away all the type generation code and lets the user specify members using an IEnumerable<some interface>.
• Either expand on the existing code, which means:
  • Runtime type generation: slow, needs to be cached, no user control, not pretty
  • ???

Possible issues:

• Input structurew will need to match file definitions 1:1 to not fail.
• Provide clear errors to the user if something is done wrong.

Surface layer

public interface IMember
{
    tring Name { get; }
    MemberType Type { get; } /* enumeration of int, etc */
    int Cardinality { get; } /* cardinality, default to 1 */
    // ?
}

Example of user code

using (var fileStreram = ...)
{
    var storage = new Storage(fileStream, new DynamicStructure().field("ID", MemberType.Int32).field("Name", MemberType.String).build(), StorageOptions.Default);

    // 0 is the record key (different from ID - it's still the user's task to create a dictionary)
    Console.WriteLine("{0} - {1}", storage[0]["ID"].Integer, storage[0]["Name"].String);

    var allNames = storage["Name"].Strings; // IEnumerable<(int, string)>
}

[Warpten]

In hindsight of current progress:

• Fluent API isn't the best but it'll stay for lack of better ideas.
• Really hard to efficiently deal with arrays.
• File parsing needs to be redesigned (again sigh)
  • Header read
  • Generate type metadata
  • Prepare blocks linked list
  • Parse blocks
  • set up type mapping if needed
  • parse records