C#C
C#•2y ago
Esa

BinarySerialization - need some design help

Hi, this is my first foray into lower level programming and I could use some help.

I am writing a DOCSIS-compliant binary serializer for C#. It will take as input a 
.cfg
 or 
.txt
 file that resembles a JSON, but is a bit different:

Main 
{
    DownstreamFrequency 130000000;
    UpstreamChannelId 123;
    NetworkAccess 1;
    ClassOfService
    {
        ClassID 5;
        MaxRateDown 512000;
        MaxRateUp 64000;
        PriorityUp 3;
        GuaranteedUp 32000;
        MaxBurstUp 54314;
        PrivacyEnable 1;
    }
    MaxCPE 13;
    SwUpgradeServer 10.1.1.1;
    /* CmMic e241803a16fa62269f90d6e1619a59d3; */
    /* CmtsMic 41141948116bcc38f6a20ec485fcd0f2; */
    /*EndOfDataMkr*/
}


This is a barebones, minified example of what these files will contain. Every line is either a property or a collection of properties.
I will refer to these properties as 
DocsisProperty<T>
, since they will be deserialized into a C# type and then encoded into 
byte[]
 later on.

Now the issue I am facing is that there are 25 ish encoding methods and 25 decoding methods, but hundreds of different properties. All unique properties are stored in a property map with name, id and a reference to the correct method for encoding or decoding.
This can be seen here: https://github.com/rlaager/docsis/blob/master/src/docsis_symtable.h

My original idea was that when I am parsing a file, I can initialize a new 
DocsisProperty<T>
 based on the identifier of the value, then later on when I want to encode it I call 
docsisProperty.Encode()
, and it will look up some static dictionary to figure out which encoding method is the appropriate one. However that gets complicated quickly because of the generic type on 
DocsisProperty<T>
. The dictionary would then have to use 
object
 or 
dynamic
 as it's return type, and I am not a fan of either approach.
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