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)

Adding a protoc plugin option

You might already have an idea of how to add options to the plugin. If you remember, we created an instance of protogen.Options in our main plugin. This Options object can work with the flags package in the standard library. We simply need to define our flags and pass the Set function to the Options instance. This looks like this (cmd/protoc-gen-check/main.go):

import (
  "flags"
  //...
)
func main() {
  var flags flag.FlagSet
  phoneRegexp := flags.String("phone_regexp", "", "custom regex for 
  phone checking.")
  opts := protogen.Options{
    ParamFunc: flags.Set,
  }
  //...
}

If you are not familiar with the flags package from the standard library, we define a flag of type string, the name phone_regexp, and the default value of the empty string.

We can now pass the phoneRegexp variable to our generateFile...