Hi all,
Is there any standard or general way to serialize table schemas, field
definitions, or type definitions to text (presumably as JSON)?
For example, I can create a thing like `pa.field("coords",
pa.struct([pa.field("x", pa.float32())]))`. Then I want to pass information
about that field to the javascript Arrow implementation to check if it has
a "z" column in the struct before deciding to render some UI element in the
browser
The simplest way I can see to do this is to wrap the one field into a table
schema, serialize that schema to IPC, encode the bytes to base64, ship and
deserialize, decode the schema in js, pop out the one field, and examine
it. While I do this in some cases, it gets cumbersome: it sure would be
helpful to have a convention like `{"name": "coords", "type": "struct",
"content": [{"name": "x", "type": "float32"}]}` that I could borrow, if
anyone's invented it.
Thanks to everyone at the project for all your work!
Ben
---
Ben Schmidt
VP Information Design, Nomic AI
atlas.nomic.ai
