Rust SDK — Serde Data Models

Rust SDK — Serde Data Models#

The FAIR Data JSON Schema project provides auto-generated Rust data structures (serde) for high-performance CLI utilities, data engineering pipelines, and WebAssembly (WASM) tools.

Overview#

The generated Rust models live in schemas/<version>/rust/src/lib.rs (and mirrored in the web distribution at dist/<version>/rust/lib.rs).

It provides:

  • Serde-annotated Data Structs: DatasetSchema, SchemaNode, TemporalCoverage, DatasetRelation

  • Type Enums: I18nString (text string vs language map), I18nText, JsonType

Dependencies (Cargo.toml)#

To deserialize or serialize FAIR JSON schemas in your Rust project, add serde and serde_json:

[dependencies]
serde = { version = "1.0", features = ["derive"] }
serde_json = "1.0"

Basic Usage#

Deserializing a FAIR Schema from JSON#

use serde_json::Result;
use fair_data_schema::DatasetSchema;

fn parse_schema(json_data: &str) -> Result<DatasetSchema> {
    let schema: DatasetSchema = serde_json::from_str(json_data)?;

    if let Some(title) = &schema.node.title {
        println!("Dataset Title: {}", title);
    }

    if let Some(license) = &schema.node.fair_license {
        println!("FAIR License: {:?}", license);
    }

    Ok(schema)
}

Building & Serializing a Schema Programmatically#

use std::collections::HashMap;
use fair_data_schema::{DatasetSchema, SchemaNode, I18nString};

fn create_schema() -> DatasetSchema {
    let mut properties = HashMap::new();

    properties.insert(
        "age".to_string(),
        SchemaNode {
            r#type: Some(serde_json::json!("integer")),
            title: Some("Age".to_string()),
            minimum: Some(0.0),
            fair_measurement_unit: Some(I18nString::Text("years".to_string())),
            ..Default::default()
        },
    );

    DatasetSchema {
        schema: Some("https://highvaluedata.net/fair-data-schema/dev".to_string()),
        node: SchemaNode {
            title: Some("Census 2024".to_string()),
            fair_license: Some(I18nString::Text("CC-BY-4.0".to_string())),
            properties: Some(properties),
            ..Default::default()
        },
    }
}

Auto-Generation#

The Rust definition file schemas/<version>/rust/src/lib.rs is auto-generated from the FAIR annotation meta-schemas using Jinja2 templates.

To regenerate Rust models for the development track:

uv run python scripts/generate_rust.py --version dev