Patent ID: 8429138

Claim:
A method in a computing device for a sender of a distributed system to encode and transmit messages containing subsets of fields of data structures in a granular way without incurring per field overhead, the method comprising the steps of: during encoding of data currently stored in each field of a subset of one or more but less than all of a plurality of fields of a data structure in a first message for a receiver, performing the following steps: determining that the combination of the subset of fields has not been sent to the receiver; generating a metadata description for the combination of the subset of fields that defines for the receiver how to decode the data currently stored in the combination of the subset of fields, wherein the metadata description does not include information on those one or more fields of the data structure that are not part of the subset of fields, wherein the metadata description does not include the data currently stored in the subset of fields; generating a metadata description identification for the metadata description that identifies only the combination of the subset of fields represented by the metadata description, wherein the metadata description identification is unique per unique metadata description; transmitting the encoded first message to the receiver including the metadata description, the metadata description identification, and data currently stored in the subset of fields; during encoding of data of the same subset of fields of the data structure in a second message, wherein the second message includes the same combination of the subset of fields as the first message, performing the following step: determining that the combination of the subset of fields has previously been sent to the receiver indicating that the metadata description identification for the metadata description is the same as that generated for the first message, and transmitting the encoded second message to the receiver including only one instance of the metadata description identification and including the data currently stored in the subset of fields without transmitting the metadata description, whereby the encoded second message is encoded without per field overhead.