Struct flattening

The flatten attribute inlines keys from a field into the parent struct. flatten may be used any number of times within the same struct. It is supported only within structs that have named fields, and the field to which it is applied must be a struct or map type.

The flatten attribute serves the following two common use cases:

Factor out frequently grouped keys

Consider a paginated API which returns a page of results along with pagination metadata that identifies how many results were requested, how far into the total set of results we are looking at, and how many results exist in total. If we are paging through a total of 1053 results 100 at a time, the third page may look like this.

{ "limit" : 100 , "offset" : 200 , "total" : 1053 , "users" : [ { "id" : "49824073-979f-4814-be10-5ea416ee1c2f" , "username" : "john_doe" }, ... ] }

This same scheme with "limit" and "offset" and "total" fields may be shared across lots of different API queries. For example we may want paginated results when querying for users, for issues, for projects, etc.

In this case it can be convenient to factor the common pagination metadata fields into a shared struct that can be flattened into each API response object.

struct Pagination { limit: u64 , offset: u64 , total: u64 , } struct Users { users: Vec <User>, pagination: Pagination, }

Capture additional fields

A field of map type can be flattened to hold additional data that is not captured by any other fields of the struct.

use std::collections::HashMap; use serde::{Serialize, Deserialize}; use serde_json::Value; struct User { id: String , username: String , extra: HashMap< String , Value>, }

For example if we fill the flattened extra field with the key "mascot": "Ferris" , it would serialize to the following JSON representation.

{ "id" : "49824073-979f-4814-be10-5ea416ee1c2f" , "username" : "john_doe" , "mascot" : "Ferris" }