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Identifiers

Identifiers are one of the cooler parts about BridgeNet2- they basically take a string you can understand and read, then assign it a three-byte identifier that both the client and server can understand! This is important because it lets you organize your data in a readable and efficient way. For example, take the following code:

local sendSomeData = BridgeNet2.ReferenceBridge("sendSomeData")

sendSomeData:Fire({
    firstThingToSend = 5,
    anotherThing = false,
})
tip

If you'd like to know more about bandwidth usage w/ networking on Roblox, you can check out this link here.

What's the problem?​

We can understand firstThingToSend and anotherThingToSend as humans, but they take more bandwidth than our actual data, three times over! Bandwidth is valuable, and we don't really want to shorten the names we see just because it takes a lot of bandwidth to send. That just makes our code harder to read.

What's the solution?​

This is where identifiers come in:

local sendSomeData = BridgeNet2.ReferenceBridge("sendSomeData")

local firstThingToSend = BridgeNet2.ReferenceIdentifier("firstThingToSend")
local anotherThing = BridgeNet2.ReferenceIdentifier("anotherThing")

sendSomeData:Fire({
    [firstThingToSend] = 5,
    [anotherThing] = false,
})

At the cost of 2 lines of code, we completely solved the problem! Our code is now both readable and efficient.