oip-protobufjs
This library provides builder functions to create OIP v0.5 records by serializing data into chain-ready protobuf data
Overview
OIP v0.5 creates records through Record Templates. A Record Template defines the schema for a given record (i.e: I
can create a Record Template called Audio Track
with the following fields: title
, artist
, genre
and then create an
Audio Track record using the created template by filling out the given fields). We use
protobuf.js to create these templates by following the proto3 message standard.
Creating A Record Template
As per the example above we'll create a Record Template called Audio Track
.
A template consists of three fields: title
, description
, and fileDescriptor
.
The fileDescriptor
is a description of a proto file and will be used to define
the schema used for the template, so we'll start with that.
Building a Record Template
// first, define the schemaconst schema = name: 'title' type: 'string' name: 'artist' type: 'string' name: 'genre' type: 'string' // second, build the fileDescriptorconst fileDescriptor = // third, define the template name and description of the record templateconst templateName = 'Audio Track'const description = 'Basic audio track details' // fourth, build the record templateconst templateBuffer template64 templateMessage = // buildRecordTemplate returns the template in buffer format, base64, and as a protobuf.js message
Creating a Record
As per the record.proto
schema found in src/messages/oipProto
, there are four
fields we can include: tags
, payment
, details
, and permissions
. We only need to
pass details
of type OipDetails
to create a record. In the same record.proto
file
we see that OipDetails
is defined as: repeated google.protobuf.Any details = 1;
which
means we can pass an array containing values of any type to it. We use this field to pass in the values of the record
as defined by the record template schema. It is necessary to have a repeated ANY field so that a record
can contain multiple data from multiple templates. Mixing and matching templates is the core power of
oip v0.5.
After you create a FileDescriptor, you use it to create the OipDetails; doing this is akin to filling out the template with actual data.
Important!! You need to first publish the Record Template before you can use it to create a record so that you can get its template name which contains part of the txid