👋 I have a use-case where i need the proto-buff message to be converted to json at android. More in 🧵

Did you mean to tag a different Zach? I know nothing about this library

Ahh okay. 😂 I meant to tag you! Sorry abt it, though.

proto-buff message to be converted to json at android

Can you just deserialise it to data class as protobuf and then use any json library to serialize it back to json?

I can, but it wont be scalable for my use-case. I was writing a flipper plugin for it, as flipper doesn't support data-store yet. From client end proto buff messages needs to be sent to the plugin in a readable format, so that it can display in the flipper desktop client. Deserialising to a data class will work for one or two use-cases, but it won't scale well in large code-base.

But isn’t to support it you need a way to load proto declarations or classes generated using those proto declarations, there is no way to get names from data itself

Yeah, i guess i do now. As there is no support for the conversion to json from proto-java-lite in android. There is a support for proto-java though, it converts protobuff message to json. https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/java/com/google/protobuf/util/JsonFormat.Printer

To do this, message should include field names, isn't it? Or some sort source of those names

That's correct which seems to be not there in java-lite version of proto-buff (the light version for android, doesn't contain the names), unlike the java (non-lite) one.