[protobuf] field of type timestamp or date with protobuf message

2011-02-12 Thread Marco@worldcorp
HI all
 is it possible to add a field of type timestamp , or date, to a
protobuf message..

i have quickly read the guide, and i saw no trace of timestamps or
fields of type date.

could anyone assist?

w/kindest regards
 marco

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Re: [protobuf] field of type timestamp or date with protobuf message

2011-02-12 Thread Henner Zeller
On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 09:13, Marco@worldcorp mmistr...@gmail.com wrote:
 HI all
  is it possible to add a field of type timestamp , or date, to a
 protobuf message..

There is no 'default' way. The reason for that is that protocol
buffers are platform independent, and there is no real agreeable way
to represent timestamps on all platforms; there are seconds,
milliseconds and microseconds since 1970 around; yet other system
represent times in even higher resolution since a different epoch
start.

Also, having protocol buffers handle timestamps might actually be too
generic; suppose you want to be sure to be interpretable in a
sufficient high resolution and protocol buffers choose to encode
microseconds since, say, 1970. Then this will encode in huge numbers (
= more wire bytes) - but OTOH, this is not really what is needed in
all contexts.

So - best is to have the application choose the time resolution that
makes sense depending on the application and deal with it in an
application dependent manner (e.g. I store seconds, milliseconds or
microseconds since 1970 GMT or Julian dates in protocol buffers to
transfer times in different contexts).

-h


 i have quickly read the guide, and i saw no trace of timestamps or
 fields of type date.

 could anyone assist?

 w/kindest regards
  marco

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