What is the best approach for serializing BigDecimal/BigInteger to ProtocolBuffers

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I am starting to migrate a custom serialization mechanism to Protocol Buffers. One data type that will be used particularly regularly is BigDecimal.

Does anyone know of a good way of serializing this within Protocol Buffers? Our current serialization routine uses BigDecimal.toPlainString() for serialization, and new BigDecimal(String) for deserialization - I'm assuming there's a better way.

My guess is to define a BigDecimal as:

message BDecimal { required int32 scale = 1; required BInteger int_val = 2;
}

But I am not too sure how to define BigInteger - perhaps using its toByteArray() method?