# Deserializers

Lenses works out of the box with any messages in AVRO, JSON, XML and primitive formats.

When using messages with other formats like **Google Protobuf** or **Thrift**, you need to provide a *deserialization envelop* or else a `serde`. A serde handles reading raw bytes into a meaningful data structure and translating data into raw bytes based on the storage format.

### Google Protobuf example <a href="#google-protobuf-example" id="google-protobuf-example"></a>

For example, a Kafka topic contains GPS coordinates, including a latitude and a longitude stored as double. Each “latitude:longitude” string, such as “45.623412:10.419433” is converted to UTF8 bytes, and published to a topic in Protobuf format.

A serde can enable us to decode/encode this format. This can be achieved via a simple API. First, use the following library dependency:

```xml
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.landoop</groupId>
    <artifactId>lenses-serde</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.3</version>
</dependency>
```

Check the following Java code that implements a Serde interface that has two methods. The return type of the deserializer is a `GenericRecord` with the two fields parsed from the bytes.

In this simple example, we do not worry about error handling, such as ensuring that the tokens have valid double values.

```java
public class LatLngSerde implements Serde {
  private Schema schema = SchemaBuilder.builder()
                          .record("lat_lng")
                          .fields()
                          .requiredDouble("lat")
                          .requiredDouble("lng")
                          .endRecord();

  @Override
  public Schema getSchema() {
    return schema;
  }

  @Override
  public Serializer serializer(Properties properties) {
    return null;
  }

  @Override
  public Deserializer deserializer(Properties properties) {
    return new Deserializer() {
      @Override
      public GenericRecord deserialize(byte[] bytes) throws IOException {
        String data = new String(bytes);
        String[] tokens = data.split(":");
        double lat = Double.parseDouble(tokens[0]);
        double lng = Double.parseDouble(tokens[1]);

        GenericRecord record = new GenericData.Record(schema);
        record.put("lat", lat);
        record.put("lng", lng);
        return record;
      }

      @Override
      public void close() throws IOException {
      }
    };
  }
}
```

{% hint style="info" %}
Serialization using custom formats is not currently supported by Lenses so there is no requirement to implement the serializer method.
{% endhint %}


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