I'm checking out Flatbuffers for implementing a communication protocol. When a message is received, it may in my case contain a number of different tables. If I understand correctly, the way to achieve this in Flatbuffers is to use a "root" table that has each possible different table in a union.
In my case, I will already know the incoming type (type is part of the header) => I do not necessarily need to be able to place each type inside a single table. However, it does not seem to be possible to mark multiple tables as "root" types. This means that if I have defined the tables Foo and Bar that I can only get either a GetFoo() or a GetBar() method for deserialization, but not both.
I am assuming that it would also be possible to split the definitions across different schema files, but since they would share some subclasses I would also need a shared schema file for the common definitions. This seems to be a bit more complicated than necessary for simple cases.
Is there another way of being able to deserialize multiple different types with Flatbuffers?
Yes, you can do this. Note that the generated GetMyType() is just short for the templated GetRootAs<MyType> which you can use with any type.