Are PerformanceResourceTiming instances supposed to have a serializer?

[siusin]

Quoted from the discussion in public-web-perf@w3.org [1].

@bzbarsky

It appears that IE has a toJSON method on these that affects what JSON.stringify returns. I see nothing like that in the spec; is it supposed to be there?

@jainarvind

So should I add the toJSON() method to PerformanceResourceTiming object and define is as:
toJSON() method:
Returns a json object representing the PerformanceResourceTiming object.

In fact should I define it on PerformanceEntry itself (as well as on window.performance.timing) to cover all Performance objects?

@bzbarsky

What you should do is define a serializer. See http://heycam.github.io/webidl/#idl-serializers and I suspect what you want here is:
serializer = { attribute };
for interfaces that don't inherit from something that needs serialization but want to serialize all their own attributes or
serializer = { inherit, attribute };

for ones that want to serialize their own attributes plus whatever their parent interface serializes. This will automatically create a toJSON method that does the right things for you.

I suggest you test what UAs do and whether the spec you write is compatible with that.

Gecko does have a serializer on PerformanceEntry and on PerformanceTiming, for what that's worth.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-perf/2014Aug/thread.html#msg0

[plehegar]

How about
https://rawgit.com/w3c/resource-timing/plh/serializer/index.html

[igrigorik]

👍

[plehegar]

Merged #6

[bzbarsky]

@plehegar Is there a reason to list all the attributes manually instead of just saying "all attributes"? Seems like this is a recipe for getting things out of sync.

Also, don't you need a serializer on PerformanceEntry too? Using "inherit" is not valid IDL unless there is an ancestor with a serializer.