CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#visual-studio-2019protocol-buffersgrpc
OneTrickDragon
OneTrickDragon

Reputation: 87

After clean project regenerating c# files from .proto in another project

I have two projects:

  1. Project hosts the code of the gRPC server and also the .proto files.
  2. Project acts as the client but has also a lot of other different functionality

I want to be able to clean and build my client project, that depends on auto generated .cs files. To generate the .cs files from .proto files Google.Protobuf and Grpc.Net.ClientFactory is used.

So far I've done: I added a service reference to my 2. project. My 2.project.csproj looks like (for an Example.proto):

<ItemGroup Condition=" '$(TargetFramework)' == 'net48' ">
  <PackageReference Include="Grpc.Core" Version="2.32.0" />
</ItemGroup>    

<ItemGroup Condition="'$(TargetFramework)' == 'netcoreapp3.1'">
  <PackageReference Include="Grpc.AspNetCore" Version="2.32.0" />
  <PackageReference Include="Grpc.Net.ClientFactory" Version="2.32.0" />
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup Condition="'$(TargetFramework)' == 'net5.0-windows'">
  <PackageReference Include="Grpc.AspNetCore" Version="2.32.0" />
  <PackageReference Include="Grpc.Net.ClientFactory" Version="2.32.0" />
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
  <PackageReference Include="Google.Protobuf" Version="3.13.0" />
  <PackageReference Include="Grpc.Tools" Version="2.32.0">
    <PrivateAssets>all</PrivateAssets>
      <IncludeAssets>runtime; build; native; contentfiles; analyzers; buildtransitive</IncludeAssets>
  </PackageReference>
  <Protobuf Include="..\Project_A\Protos\Example.proto" GrpcServices="Client">
    <Link>Protos\Example.proto</Link>
  </Protobuf>
</ItemGroup>

When I am now changing the .protofile the client .cs files get generated in the path:

...\2.project\obj\$(ConfigurationName)\$(FrameworkName)\

This all fine when simply building the second project. But whenever the second project gets a clean rebuild the .cs files are not generated again leaving me with missing dependencies.

I would guess somewhere is a option to trigger the generation of .proto files before the build starts? Or Should I exclude the generated files from the cleanup? Or is there some other way to achieve this that I'm not seeing?

UPDATE:

I now moved the proto files in a seperate project and import them now using this statement:

    <ItemGroup>
        <Protobuf Include="..\Proto_Project\Protos\Example.proto" GrpcServices="Client" OutputDir="Protos" CompileOutputs="false">
            <Link>Protos\Example.proto</Link>
        </Protobuf>
    </ItemGroup>

This works in that way, that everytime I change the proto, it gets reconverted in .cs. But here is the source of my current (and also previous, as I know think) problem. Every time I rebuild the solution the protofiles get reconvertet to .cs. The problem is that this happens after the compilation of the project. This leads to missing dependencies, since the files are not present at compile time. When simply building the solution the files are not retranslated and everything works.

How can I either stop the protobuf compiler from running on rebuild, or let him run earlier?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1349

Answers (1)

Bart
Bart

Reputation: 1580

I would advice you to decouple the two projects by moving all the .proto files to a separate code repository. Next use that repository in your other projects and generate the proto code for that project specifically. This way you can also use the backwards compatibility properties of Protobuf.

With git you can do that with git submodules. You can track the version of the proto file repo in your server and client project.

Upvotes: 2

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