Value converters

Thrift doesn't have many primitive types, which means some types of data have to be transmitted in less-than-ideal ways. However, it doesn't have to stay that way after transmission.

Enter value converters. They allows you to implement a converter from a Thrift type to another type. These converters can be applied to struct fields, method return types and method parameters using the ThriftConverterAttribute attribute like so:

// inside a class
[ThriftField( 1, true, "date" )]
[ThriftConverter( typeof( ThriftUnixDateConverter )]
public DateTime Date { get; private set; }

This example will serialize and deserialize the DateTime object as an Unix timestamp (i.e. the number of seconds since January 1, 1970).

Available converters

Converter name	From type	To type	Description
ThriftUnixDateConverter	i32	System.DateTime	32-bit Unix timestamp.
ThriftUnixDate64Converter	i64	System.DateTime	Same as above, in 64 bits.
ThriftJavaDateConverter	i64	System.DateTime	64-bit Java timestamp.
ThriftUnixDateOffsetConverter	i32	System.DateTimeOffset	32-bit Unix timestamp.
ThriftUnixLongDateOffsetConverter	i64	System.DateTimeOffset	Same as above, in 64 bits.
ThriftJavaDateOffsetConverter	i64	System.DateTimeOffset	64-bit Java timestamp.

Implementing your own converter

Implement the ThriftValueConverter<TFrom, TTo> abstract class.
It contains two methods: TTo Convert( TFrom value ) and TFrom ConvertBack( TTo value ).