What the best ways to use decimals and datetimes with protocol buffers?

Question

I would like to find out what is the optimum way of storing some common data type that were not included in the list supported by protocol buffers.

• datetime (secon

Answer 1

For datetime with millisecond resolution I used an int64 that has the datetime as YYYYMMDDHHMMSSmmm. This makes it both concise and readable, and surprisingly, will last a very long time.

For decimals, I used byte[], knowing that there's no better representation that won't be lossy.