Book Image

Protocol Buffers Handbook

By : Clément Jean
Book Image

Protocol Buffers Handbook

By: Clément Jean

Overview of this book

Explore how Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) serialize structured data and provides a language-neutral, platform-neutral, and extensible solution. With this guide to mastering Protobuf, you'll build your skills to effectively serialize, transmit, and manage data across diverse platforms and languages. This book will help you enter the world of Protocol Buffers by unraveling the intricate nuances of Protobuf syntax and showing you how to define complex data structures. As you progress, you’ll learn schema evolution, ensuring seamless compatibility as your projects evolve. The book also covers advanced topics such as custom options and plugins, allowing you to tailor validation processes to your specific requirements. You’ll understand how to automate project builds using cutting-edge tools such as Buf and Bazel, streamlining your development workflow. With hands-on projects in Go and Python programming, you’ll learn how to practically apply Protobuf concepts. Later chapters will show you how to integrate data interchange capabilities across different programming languages, enabling efficient collaboration and system interoperability. By the end of this book, you’ll have a solid understanding of Protobuf internals, enabling you to discern when and how to use and redefine your approach to data serialization.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Hiding sensitive data

The last thing that I want to add for this mini-project to be complete is to work with a field option. In our case, we will work with an option called debug_redact. This tells an application to redact the private information in the data. For us, this means hiding the phone numbers and email addresses.

Let’s start by adding the option to the fields we want to redact in our proto file:

message Person {
  //...
  message PhoneNumber {
    string number = 1 [debug_redact = true];
    Type type = 2;
  }
  string email = 1 [debug_redact = true];
  repeated PhoneNumber phones = 2;
}
message Company {
  //...
  message EmailAddress {
    string email = 1 [debug_redact = true];
    Department department = 2;
  }
  message PhoneNumber {
    string number = 1 [debug_redact...