Hi All, Again I am new to this, so please continue to bear with me and thanks to Benjamin Wright for all the help so far!! I think that I am thinking myself into a circle between the FileDescriptors, FileDescriptorSets, FileDescriptorProtos, and so on. It is not yet really clear what is what between them all.
So, with help from Benjamin, I can get all the base proto and dependency file names and field names in one way or another. Also, I am creating the descriptors files "on the fly" if they do not already exist for each message type (I have not control over the messsages being passed and cannot add the deccriptors to the messages themselves). I am still fuzzy on if I should put all the fields into one Desriptor proto and pass that or all the files in one DescriptorSet and pass that, or something else, but I'll figure that out eventually. Then I need to (or at least I THINK that I need to): 1) Create a new protobuf message based on the definition defined for the protobuf files and fields based on all the Descriptor and dependency stuff above (I think this should be a DynamicMessage based on what I have seen and read) 2) Do something similar to the C++ equivalent of protobuf- >ParseFromString(message.getData()); to deserialize and get the byte array I have containing the actual message data into it I suspect that since there is protobuf no parsing in Java, I'll have to call out to protoc again, but if so am not sure what to pass it or even if my steps above are where I really need to go next. It may be that I need to iterate through each field, get it's type, and then parse from the byte stream based on that iteration. I also wonder if it would be faster and easier to just create a Java version of the message based on the C++ version that I am being passed in the byte array and use that instead? The overall base steps I need to do are: 1) Get a byte array containing protobuf message that was was compiled and serialized in C++ 2) Get the structure of that message (base type and dependency files and fields in order and I can get this now, but not sure what I am doing is optimal) 3) Glue the message data into #2 above and display the it (again I think this may require a protoc call out, but maybe not) Getting the files and fields is great and cool considering that I just started playing with these - not because I wanted to but because I have to! Now I just want to be sure am doing it the best way and need to figure out how best to glue it all together. Most of the examples I can find assume the message was compiled for Java and that I know the type (the infamous Person Class in most of them) in advance and I do not. Any additional help or thoughts are appreciated. Thanks again, Dale -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Protocol Buffers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf?hl=en.
