rust

planus-example – Small examples showing how to use planus with Rust

Basic concepts

For every type (except enums) in the flatbuffers schema planus generates both an owned type, named the same as the flatbuffers type, and a reference type with a Ref suffix and a lifetime tied to the buffer containing the serialized flatbuffers data. The owned type can be created from the reference type using the TryInto trait.

The generated code cannot panic, so every function that can potentially fail returns a planus::Result. This can quickly lead to a lot of unwrap(), so we recommended that you put your planus code into a function where you can use the ? operator to propagate the deserialization errors.

Running the examples

Here are some recommended commands to get started:

# Generate a PDF overview of the schema using GraphViz
foo@bar:~$ cargo run -p planus-cli -- dot monster.fbs -o monster.dot
foo@bar:~$ dot -Tsvg monster.dot -o monster.svg
foo@bar:~$ xdg-open monster.svg

# Re-generate the monster_generated.rs file in case monster.fbs has been changed
foo@bar:~$ cargo run -p planus-cli -- rust monster.fbs -o src/monster_generated.rs

# Run the API-test to generate monster.bin
foo@bar:~$ cargo run --example api_example monster.bin

# Print the file generated by the API-test
foo@bar:~$ cargo run --example print monster.bin

# Convert the file to json
foo@bar:~$ cargo run --example to_json monster.bin > monster.json

# Convert back to binary form
foo@bar:~$ cargo run --example from_json monster.json monster2.bin

# Open the documentation for the crate
foo@bar:~$ cargo doc --open