🐇 Let’s turn to discussing the JSON output changes. We can add another option to XvcOutputLine, like XvcOutputLine::Json(T: Serialize), that will output the type using serde_json. It won’t introduce any other type.

🐢 Yes, but what will T be? Although store structures have Serde implementations, they are not particularly useful for this.

🐇 We can have output types, named like XvcFileListOutput, that will be converted to strings with serialization.

🦊 We do something similar in xvc pipeline export and import commands. We use XvcPipelineSchema and XvcStepSchema just for the import and export commands. We’ll write similar structs for all JSON output and will use Serde to convert these to strings.

🐢 Unlike the import and export commands, we have optional fields in the output, though. I don’t want content digests to appear in JSON output if they are not required.

🐇 Let’s search for optional fields in Serde.

🦊 There is a crate for optional fields.

🐢 We don’t need another crate for this. Serde has the skip_serializing_if attribute for fields. We can add Option::is_none as a method to these to skip outputting None fields. All those fields, in this case, will be optional.

🐇 This is fine. We already use structs to format the xvc file list output. We can just use them to output JSON.