Data formats in Orbital

Data formats specify how Orbital should read and write data.

By default, Orbital assumes that data is provided as JSON. However, by adding a Data Format to a model, this can be modified to any type of serialization format.

​

API Specs and Message formats

Some API specs which define transport also have their own message format (eg., Protobuf). If that’s the case, you generally don’t need to do anything - Orbital applies the correct formats when parsing the API spec.

​

Using message formats in Taxi

If you’re using Taxi to describe your API specs, you need to specify the data format that is used for reading/writing messages.

By default, messages are expected to be in JSON. Other formats can be specified using an annotation on the top level type.

For example:

import com.orbitalhq.formats.Xml

@Xml
model Person {
  firstName : FirstName
}

You only need to apply the annotation to the top level entity.

​

Defining custom formats

Internally, Orbital uses a ModelFormatSpec to provide format-specific serialization & deserialization implementations.

While it is possible to define your own custom format, to load it into Orbital currently requires a custom build - available for Enterprise customers only.

Support for loading custom formats via Taxi projects is planned - Vote for this issue or reach out to us if you’d like to discuss getting this feature supported.