Feature Request: automatic serialization / deserialization of S7 classes

[natemcintosh]

The general idea

Something similar to go's json.Marshall() and json.Unmarshall(), which allow (mostly) automatic conversion to and from JSON.

Use cases

• Configuration objects (my use case). You have a model that is complex enough to require a number of input parameters, some of them nested. Maybe you started with a list, but it's getting hard to keep track of all necessary fields, so you move to a class. Would be extremely handy to be able to read/write configurations directly to/from files (JSON, YAML, TOML, etc.)
• Accepting structured data from a web API directly into a class.
• Many non-web systems produce structured data, and it would be very convenient to be able to ingest their data directly into a class.

Issues with this suggestion

• Seems like a minefield of edge cases
• Lots of hard choices on how opinionated should such a system should be:
  • automatic type conversion, e.g. should it automatically convert a string to a date?
  • nested cases, e.g. how do you manage an Address class inside a Person class.
  • case matching, e.g. called address in JSON, but your property/class name is Address

Feel free to say "won't do" and close; I'm aware this is a big ask 😅.

[vladimirobucina]

@natemcintosh @hadley is there any work on this? If no one started working on this I might pick it up and investigate. I would also be interested in conversion to a list, that's why I came here. I also saw this one #547

[natemcintosh]

@vladimirobucina I have not done any work on this.

[lawremi]

Check out the wizrd package: https://github.com/lawremi/wizrd.

In order to communicate with LLMs, it converts between S7 classes and JSON schema, and (de)serializes objects in accordance with schemas. It's quite complete and I would be happy to work with someone who wanted to extract it into its own package.

[vladimirobucina]

@lawremi great, I will have a look. serialization/transformation process is needed in a lot of packages, so it would be nice to have one package to just do that, and separate the whole logic in one place for people to use.

[mmaechler]

A propos "general" (de-/)serialization: Is it possible (probably not ..) to come up with a general scheme for the case where most of the R object is from an external pointer; I'm interested "in the name" of @JaganM and his {flint} package
https://github.com/jaganmn/flint where serialization of "flint-numbers" is also still open.