VDFLex  

VDFLex is a (de)serialization library for parsing the Valve Data File format with serde. VDF—or more generally, KeyValues—is a data format developed by Valve for use in Steam and the Source engine.

LightmappedGeneric
{
    $basetexture "myassets\gravel01"
    $surfaceprop gravel
}

Installation

Add the following to your project's Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
serde = { version = "1.0.0", features = ["derive"] }
vdflex = "0.1.1"

Feature Flags

• default: No features
• preserve_order: Preserve entry insertion order

Quick Start

use std::collections::BTreeMap;
use std::hash::Hash;
use serde::Serialize;

#[derive(Copy, Clone, PartialOrd, Ord, PartialEq, Eq, Hash, Serialize)]
struct AppId(u32);

#[derive(Serialize)]
#[serde(rename_all = "PascalCase")]
struct AppBuild {
    #[serde(rename = "AppID")]
    app_id: AppId,
    desc: String,
    content_root: String,
    build_output: String,
    depots: BTreeMap<AppId, Depot>
}

#[derive(Serialize)]
struct Depot {
    #[serde(rename = "FileMapping")]
    file_mappings: Vec<FileMapping>
}

#[derive(Serialize)]
struct FileMapping {
    #[serde(rename = "LocalPath")]
    local_path: String,
    #[serde(rename = "DepotPath")]
    depot_path: String,
}

fn main() -> vdflex::Result<()> {
    let mut depots = BTreeMap::new();
    depots.insert(AppId(1234), Depot {
        file_mappings: vec![FileMapping { 
            local_path: String::from("*"),
            depot_path: String::from("."),
        }],
    });
    
    let build_script = AppBuild {
        app_id: AppId(1234),
        desc: String::from("My SteamPipe build script"),
        content_root: String::from("..\\assets\\"),
        build_output: String::from("..\\build\\"),
        depots,
    };
    
    let text: String = vdflex::kv_to_string("AppBuild", &build_script)?;
    println!("{text}");
    // "AppBuild"
    // {
    //     "AppID" "1234"
    //     "BuildOutput" "..\build\"
    //     "ContentRoot" "..\assets\"
    //     "Depots"
    //     "Desc" "My SteamPipe build script"
    //     {
    //         "1234"
    //         {
    //             "FileMapping"
    //             {
    //                 "DepotPath" "."
    //                 "LocalPath" "*"
    //             }
    //         }
    //     }
    // }
  

    Ok(())
}

Supported Types

KeyValues is woefully underspecified, but in general it only supports strings and multimaps (objects). VDFLex attempts to support every Rust type, but not all types necessarily have an "idiomatic" or "useful" representation. These are the types that VDFlex supports and how they are represented in KeyValues:

Limitations

• The Bytes type is unsupported, as there is no clear way to represent binary data in KeyValues.
• Sequences are weird. It's not possible to serialize top-level or nested sequences. See Error::UnrepresentableSequence for more.

Missing Features

This library is in an early state. As such, many features have not yet been implemented. Some missing features include:

• Deserialization
  • Text parsing
  • Conversion to Rust types
• An easier API for Object
• A keyvalues! macro to create Objects
• Conditional tags
  • The ser::Formatter API supports conditional tags, but this is unsupported for the serde API.
• #base and #include directives
  • The ser::Formatter API supports macro formatting, but the serde API treats macros like normal fields.

License

This library is licensed under the MIT license (https://opensource.org/license/MIT).