How to access a Message and use google.protobuf.Any

[psaelango]

ProtoFile - gateway.proto

import "google/protobuf/timestamp.proto";
package test.io.gateway;

service Gateway
{
  rpc UserLogin (UserLoginCmd) returns (UserLoginRsp) {}
}
message UserLoginCmd
{
    string username= 1;
    string password = 2;
}
message UserLoginRsp
{
    string accesstoken= 1;
}
message Something
{
    google.protobuf.Any data = 1;
}

Javascript File - some.js

PROTO_PATH = "C:\\Users\\firstname.lastname\\Documents\\io\\gateway.proto";
protoDefinition = protoLoader.loadSync(PROTO_PATH,{
    keepCase: true,
    longs: String,
    enums: String,
    defaults: true,
    oneofs: true
  });
proto = grpc.loadPackageDefinition(protoDefinition).test.io.gateway;
console.log(proto); //Has only service (Gateway) 

The above code runs fine and prints only the service. But I want access the message (Something) to achieve this - protocolbuffers/protobuf#2612.

Please kindly help me here to understand the way to access the message and google.protobuf.Any.

Thanks in advance.

@murgatroid99 - Can you please kindly share your thoughts. Also I couldn't able to use includeDirs properly.

PROTO_PATH = "C:\\Users\\firstname.lastname\\Documents\\io\\gateway.proto";
protoDefinition = protoLoader.loadSync(PROTO_PATH,{
    keepCase: true,
    longs: String,
    enums: String,
    defaults: true,
    oneofs: true,
    includeDirs: ["C:\\Users\\firstname.lastname\\Documents\\io\\*.proto"]
  });
proto = grpc.loadPackageDefinition(protoDefinition).test.io.gateway; // Get error - io of undefined

The above code crashes & gives error io of undefined

[murgatroid99]

First of all, the @grpc/proto-loader package is intended to be used for loading service definitions in .proto files for use with other grpc libraries. In your .proto file, you do not use the Something message type in a service, so you should not expect to be able to access it using the proto loader library.

Second, you seem to be saying that you want to use the solution in the issue you linked to. That issue is about the package google-protobuf, so you should use that package. If your goal is to use a google.protobuf.Any object with @grpc/proto-loader, you are going to have some difficulty. That package does not have any special support for the Any type, so you will have to explicitly use a protobuf implementation to serialize and deserialize the binary blob in the object.

Third, the includeDirs option has to be a list of directory names. The value you passed is not a directory name but a glob, which is not valid there.

[psaelango]

@murgatroid99 - My apologies. Something message is an example for google.protobuf.Any. But I couldn't able to access UserLoginCmd as well. So can you please tell how to access UserLoginCmd message. Also for includeDirs - I have tried "C:\\Users\\firstname.lastname\\Documents\\io" which didn't work

[nicolasnoble]

You don't access the messages using @grpc/proto-loader. That's not its purpose.

[psaelango]

@murgatroid99 @nicolasnoble - Can you guys please give an example implementation of google.protobuf.Any for javascript.

[nicolasnoble]

I'm not familiar with google.protobuf.Any, and you're asking questions about protobuf's API, not grpc's. I'm not properly equipped to answer this.

[murgatroid99]

If you are using the google-protobuf library, you should follow along with the issue you linked in the original post. If you are using @grpc/proto-loader, that library does not have any special handling for google.protobuf.Any, and I would suggest looking at https://github.com/dcodeIO/protobuf.js to figure out how to manually handle it. Either way, this question does not really seem to be about grpc, so I am closing it.