Serialize a remote struct with private String - rust

Question

I need to serialize a struct from a remote crate and all of the fields in the struct are private. There are getter's implemented in the remote struct to get those values. I am following this guidance and got it to work just fine for primitive types. However, I'm struggling with how to implement this for non-primitive types (ie: String) that the remote struct contains.
Below is a small piece of what I've implemented to frame the issue. The DataWrapper struct simply wraps Data, where Data is the remote struct.
#[derive(Serialize)]
pub struct DataWrapper {
#[serde(with = "DataDef")]
pub data: Data,
}
#[derive(Serialize)]
#[serde(remote = "remote_crate::data::Data")]
pub struct DataDef {
#[serde(getter = "Data::image_id")] // This works
image_id: u16,
#[serde(getter = "Data::description")] // This does not work
description: String,
}
The error I get when compiling this is
#[derive(Serialize)]
^^^^^^^^^ expected struct `std::string::String`, found `&str`
This makes sense, since the getter Data::description returns &str rather than a String. But, I'm not seeing a way in my code to coerce this so the compiler is happy.
If I change DataDef::description to be &str instead of String, then I have to implement lifetimes. But, when I do that, the compiler then says the remote "struct takes 0 lifetime arguments".
Appreciate any tips on how I can serialize this and other non-primitive types.

Answer 1

One approach you could do, so that you have full control of the serialization. Is to have the data wrapper be a copy of the struct fields you need, instead of the entire remote struct. Then you can implement From<remote_crate::data::Data> for DataWrapper and use serde without trying to coerce types.
#[derive(Serialize)]
pub struct Data {
image_id: u16,
description: String,
}
impl From<remote_crate::data::Data> for Data {
fn from(val: remote_crate::data::Data) -> Self {
Self {
image_id: val.image_id,
description: val.description.to_string(),
}
}
}
// Then you could use it like this:
// let my_data: Data = data.into();

Answer 2

I couldn't get it to work with an &str, but if you're OK with an allocation, you can write a custom getter:
mod local {
use super::remote::RemoteData;
use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};
fn get_owned_description(rd: &RemoteData) -> String {
rd.description().into()
}
#[derive(Serialize)]
#[serde(remote = "RemoteData")]
pub struct DataDef {
#[serde(getter = "get_owned_description")]
description: String,
}
}
mod remote {
use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
pub struct RemoteData {
description: String,
}
impl RemoteData {
pub fn description(&self) -> &str {
&self.description
}
}
}
https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=e9c7c0b069d7e16b6faac2fa2b840c72