All,
I'm just now starting to use protobuf by way of the support for grpc in
NodeJS with TypeScript. One thing that stands out to me right away is that
the syntax for initializing and "hydrating" messages is pretty clunky. Just
a basic hello world operations has a lot of "ceremony" in order to
initialize data objects and populate values:
sayHello: handleUnaryCall<HelloRequest, HelloReply> = (call, callback)
> => {
> console.log("Handling call", call)
> const {name} = call.request.toObject()
>
> const reply = new HelloReply()
> reply.setMessage(`Hello ${name}`)
>
> callback(null, reply)
> }
>
It feels to me like the most common cases would simply use object literals,
or at the very least esnext compatible setters on the value objects. I
found a request for such a feature in the grpc-node project
https://github.com/grpc/grpc-node/issues/1378
and it looks like the original poster was directed to inquire about it from
the protobuf project. I didn't see a corresponding feature request and
before raising one myself I wanted to just ask as a general question. Is
there a more user friendly way to do this? The .toObject function doesn't
really seem to help since it's only "one way". I'd really love to be able
to rewrite the above as this instead:
sayHello: handleUnaryCall<HelloRequest, HelloReply> = (call, callback)
> => {
> console.log("Handling call", call)
> const {name} = call.request
>
> callback(null, { message : `Hello ${name}` })
> }
>
Not only is it shorter, and more idiomatic, it also has the advantage in
TypeScript of checking for exhaustivity (all non-null properties must be
set) which isn't really possible with the setter-based solution.
Thanks
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