The Ultimate Guide to gRPC in ASP.NET Core/

...

/

Advanced Protobuf Features

Advanced Protobuf Features

Learn about the option of advanced features in Protobuf.

We'll cover the following...

Previously, we encountered the option keyword while overriding the C# namespace for auto-generated code stubs based on our Protobuf files. However, this keyword can do a lot more than this. It can be applied at the file level, object level, and field level, depending on what option we want to use.

There are many different configuration options available in Protobuf. Some of them are no longer used and exist for legacy reasons, but there are several that are pretty useful. These are the options we'll focus on in this lesson.

Adding options to Protobuf files

We'll use the following interactive code widget to apply all of our code changes.

syntax = "proto3";

option csharp_namespace = "BasicGrpcService";

import "google/protobuf/wrappers.proto";
import "google/protobuf/duration.proto";
import "google/protobuf/timestamp.proto";
import "google/protobuf/any.proto";

package basic_grpc_service;

service Chatbot {
  rpc SendMessage (ChatRequest) returns (ChatReply);
}

message ChatRequest {
  google.protobuf.StringValue name = 1;
  google.protobuf.StringValue message = 2;
  google.protobuf.Timestamp request_start_time = 3;
}

message ChatReply {
  google.protobuf.StringValue message = 1;
  google.protobuf.BoolValue answer_found = 2;
  google.protobuf.BytesValue reply_in_bytes = 3;
  google.protobuf.Int32Value message_size_in_bytes = 4;
  google.protobuf.DoubleValue message_size_in_megabytes = 5;
  google.protobuf.Timestamp request_received_time = 6;
  google.protobuf.Duration request_processed_duration = 7;
  google.protobuf.Any dynamic_payload = 8;
}
Base application to be used

We'll now open the chatbot.proto file inside the Protos folder of the BasicGrpcService project. The highlighted lines 4–7 show ...