CODEWITHSUNDEEP
schemaflatbuffers
billyzaelani
billyzaelani

Reputation: 597

Flatbuffers Schema: Vectors of unions

I got this error while trying vectors of unions

error: Vectors of unions are not yet supported in all the specified 
programming languages.

Clearly flatbuffers doesn't support vectors of unions. So i need another data type to solve my problem. Here's my case:

Using model Entity Component System (ECS), i have 3 entities and 3 components, here's the structure

EntityA            EntityB            EntityC
    component1        component1        component3
    component3        component2

If i can use vectors of unions the schema look like this

union Components { Component1, Component2, Component3 }

table Update {
    component:[Components];
}

Where Component[N] are tables. Actually i have a solution without vectors of unions

table Update {
    component1:[Component1];
    component2:[Component2];
    component3:[Component3];
}

But when list of component increase it's becoming unmanageable.

I'm sorry, i'm using ECS and this is for game development actually. But it's not about the game, so i think this is the right place for asking this kind of problem.

How to solve this without Vectors of unions and better than above solution?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2835

Answers (1)

Aardappel
Aardappel

Reputation: 6074

Yes, vectors of unions is a new feature (added just a few weeks ago) that so far is only available in C++.

The traditional way is to create a table Component { c:Components; } to wrap the union value, then to make a [Component] out of them.

Using multiple vectors may indeed become inefficient if the number of components is high.

Upvotes: 4

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