Is there a way to configure the generate method na

Question

I am hoping to use a grpc-node client to talk to a microservice built in Go using the go-micro framework. I am running into an issue where go-micro defines method names using periods (.) to separate namespaces and method names, whereas grpc-node slashes (/). Is there anyway to configure this pattern to have these two processes talk to each other?

Answer 1

The gRPC over HTTP/2 protocol documentation defines that the path is constructed as follows:

Path → ":path" "/" Service-Name "/" {method name}

with this additional note

Some gRPC implementations may allow the Path format shown above to be overridden, but this functionality is strongly discouraged. gRPC does not go out of its way to break users that are using this kind of override, but we do not actively support it, and some functionality (e.g., service config support) will not work when the path is not of the form shown above.

So, the Node gRPC client is following the specification, and the alternate format used by go-micro appears to be hard coded in their code generation plugin (here). I would consider that to be a bug.

That being said, there is a viable workaround to match that method name format in the Node gRPC library. When you load a .proto file in the Node each client constructor function has a service member which is a plain JavaScript object that describes the service. It is a map of method names to method definitions, and each method definition includes a path member. You can modify the path of each method to match the pattern that go-micro uses, then pass the resulting service object to grpc.makeGenericClientConstructor to get a new client constructor that connects to the modified service.