Question

Is it possible to detect the type of a raw protocol buffer message (in byte[])

I have a situation where an endpoint can receive different messages and I need to be able to detect the type before I can deserialize it.

I am using protobuf-net

Answer 1

You can’t detect the type in isolation, since the protobuf spec doesn’t add any data to the stream for this; however, there are a number of ways of making this easy, depending on the context:

• a union type (as mentioned by Jon) covers a range of scenarios
• inheritance (protobuf-net specific) can be versatile – you can have a base-message type, and any number of concrete message types
• you can use a prefix to indicate the incoming type

the last approach is actually very valuable in the case of raw TCP streams; this is on the wire identical to the union type, but with a different implementation; by deciding in advance that 1=Foo, 2=Bar etc (exactly as you do for the union type approach), you can use SerializeWithLengthPrefix to write (specifying the 1/2/etc as the field number), and the non-generic TryDeserializeWithLengthPrefix to read (this is under Serializer.NonGeneric in the v1 API, or on the TypeModel in the v2 API), you can provide a type-map that resolves the numbers back to types, and hence deserialize the correct type. And to pre-empt the question “why is this useful with TCP streams?” – because: in an ongoing TCP stream you need to use the WithLengthPrefix methods anyway, to avoid over-reading the stream; so you might as well get the type identifier for free!

summary:

• union type: easy to implement; only down side is having to then check which of the properties is non-null
• inheritance: easy to implement; can use polymorphism or discriminator to handle “what now?”
• type prefix: a bit more fiddly to implement, but allows more flexibility, and has zero overhead on TCP streams