Hi Rustaceans,

I’m writing my engineering thesis in Rust — it’s a network visualizer that retrieves data from routers via protocols like SNMP, NETCONF, and RESTCONF, and uses routing protocol data (like the OSPF LSDB) to reconstruct and visualize the network topology.

I want the app to be extensible, so adding another data acquisition client or routing protocol parser would be easy.

Here’s a high-level overview of the architecture (see image):

Data Acquisition — handles how data is retrieved (SNMP, NETCONF, RESTCONF) and returns RawRouterData. Routing Protocol Parsers — convert raw data into protocol-specific structures (e.g., OSPF LSAs), then into a protocol-agnostic NetworkGraph. Network Graph — defines NetworkGraph, Node, and Edge structures. GUI — displays the NetworkGraph using eframe.

Repository link (Some things are hardcoded for now since I needed a working demo recently.)

The problem

For the Data Acquisition layer, I’d like to define a trait so parsers can use any client interchangeably. However, I’m struggling to design a function signature that’s both useful and generic enough for all clients.

Each client type needs different parameters:

SNMP - OIDs and operation type

RESTCONF - HTTP method and endpoint

NETCONF - XML RPC call

I’m thinking the trait could return Vec<RawRouterData>, but I’m unsure what the argument(s) should be. I briefly considered an enum with variants for each client type, but it feels wrong and not very scalable.

So my questions are:

How would you design a trait for this kind of multi-protocol data acquisition layer? 1.

Do you see any broader architectural issues or improvements in this design?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated - I’m still learning how to structure larger Rust projects and would love to hear your thoughts.