Using Dynamic Types in Protobuf
Explore how to work with dynamic data types in Protobuf by using the Any type, which allows packing and unpacking of various message types in gRPC applications. Understand how to integrate Any fields in your Protobuf definitions and manage them in C# for flexible message serialization and deserialization.
We'll cover the following...
Even strongly typed languages sometimes have a need to work with dynamically assigned data types. Sometimes, we won't know the exact type of an object until a specific scenario occurs. This is why C# gives us the ability to have the object as a variable type or use dynamic.
Protobuf also has this ability. The library of well-known types has a type called Any. This type allows us to assign any message type to a field. It doesn't work with scalar value types, but still delivers the ability to work with dynamically-assigned types. This is what we'll cover in this lesson.
Adding the Any type to a Protobuf definition
We'll make our changes in the following code widget. In its current state, ...