Usually when I'm doing Network based work I am using Protobuf to move custom objects around the network that are modelled for the system that is being built to move my data/composed objects from other systems.
I am currently involved in enhancing a project that is using a proprietary text based protocol that predominately uses text for serialisation (, | and [] notations) of data and Entityspaces as the Data Access layer.
The question I'm asking is should I create another layer of objects that provide the Protobuf network objects that are populated from the "load" of Data from the Entityspaces objects or should I add the necessary protobuf tags to the objects in the Entityspaces objects (they get autogenerated from the database and currently don't have that)
Could go either way. If you need to to encode protobuf data into a text format: use base-64, which conveniently doesn't use | / [ / ].
If you prefer to protobuf-encode objects that aren't currently attributed, there are ways to do that too: if the types from the database are generated as partial classes, then at the simplest you can just do (in another code file):
namespace The.Same.Namespace {
[ProtoContract]
[ProtoPartialMember(1, "Foo")]
[ProtoPartialMember(2, "Bar")]
...
partial class SomeEntity {}
}
where Foo and Bar are members you want serialized. Or alternatively, you can configure the entire model at runtime:
RuntimeTypeModel.Default.Add(typeof(SomeEntity), false).Add("Foo", "Bar");
(that is a very basic configuration; much more subtle options are available)