Encoding

[19h]

Hey there again!

We should either adapt to LevelDOWN or add an abstraction layer allowing binary as well as non-binary data (f.i. JSON). So either the client specifies the encoding for the .put-process or the server specifies the encoding for all the keys (hammer variant, but makes sense somewhat).

[dominictarr]

we'll need to rewrite quite several dependencies to get non-json data with multilevel.
@juliangruber has started on some of this work https://github.com/juliangruber/level-rpc

[juliangruber]

as of version 4.0.0 multilevel supports binary data! See https://github.com/juliangruber/multilevel/blob/master/test/binary.js for a passing test.

Just set keyEncoding or valueEncoding to binary or whatever else and it will just work.

[feross]

Is there a way to set valueEncoding to json or binary one time and have it apply to every db.put call?

LevelUp allows this with:
levelup(dbPath, { valueEncoding: 'json' })

[dominictarr]

@feross you should set the default encoding when you create the database on the server.

[feross]

@dominictarr d'oh! should have figured that out. thanks!

[juliangruber]

For api consistency you should also be able to specify the client-specific global encoding in the multilevel client

[juliangruber]

if someone wants this, please go for it :)