What Is gRPC and Different Types of gRPC Services

This article covers

• What is gRPC
• Different Types of gRPC Services
• Messages Declaration
• Empty parameter
• Collections in gRPC
• Protocol buffer supported types and their default values with C# equivalents
• C# sample and source project

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a network protocol for establishing procedure calls on a remote computer using an application server — also known as a client/server model. The first description of Remote Procedure Call dates back to 1976 in the RFC 707 standard (https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc707). Understanding the RPC principles and the RFC 707 standard was helpful for me to understand gRPC. It’s always good to understand the basis of a system. With RPC, a client invokes a function, a server procedure with parameters. When the server receives the request, it sends the required response back to the client. The client waits for the server to respond and cannot perform other operations until the server has finished the request. gRPC is influenced by this RPC model established long before gRPC Figure bellow shows the RPC model principle:

The RPC model principle

What is gRPC ?

gRPC is a Google-created, open source, schema-first Remote Procedure Call framework that takes advantage of the HTTP/2 protocol to transport messages in binary. These messages are serialized and deserialized using Protocol Buffers, which are a type of Interface Definition Language (IDL).

Deffirrent Types of gRPC Services

gRPC supports four types of calls to the server:

• Unary
• Server-streaming
• Client-streaming
• Bidirectional

Unlike a REST API, which only supports unary type calls (unary :the client sends a request, and the server receives it and returns the response with its status to the client), gRPC supports all four types, as described next.

Unary Calls

The client initiates the remote procedure call with the method name, metadata, and the request message. Then the server returns the response with the gRPC status, the response message, and metadata

gRPC Unary service type

Server-Streaming Calls

The client initiates the remote procedure call with the method name, metadata, and the request message. Then it receives a streaming response from the server. The request’s status is sent to the client at the end of the streaming response (all data has been transmitted to the client along with its metadata)

gRPC server-streaming service type

Client-Streaming Calls

Client initiates the remote procedure call with the method name and metadata. Then the client sends streaming messages. However, the server can send the request status code and metadata before sending the client’s messages. If a problem occurs on the server and it has already sent the status and metadata, detecting errors is difficult.

gRPC client-streaming service type

Bidirectional Streaming Calls

Each party sends its messages by streaming, and this can be done in parallel, which means there is no order in which client/server messages are sent and received. The client initiates the remote procedure call with the method name and metadata. Then the server can respond to it immediately by returning the status and its metadata (or when the client has finished sending all of its messages)

gRPC bidirectional service type

As sample below is CRUD operations with all possible gRPC services

Messages Declaration

all messages share the same rule:

• any message must be defined with the message keyword
• each property is optional by default
• each property must be assigned a position required for the serialization/de-serialization process and must be unique

Empty Parameter

if you have no parameter to send to the server or to return to the
client, it is mandatory to create an empty message without properties. like for GetAll() for input parameter(request type) and Update() output parameter(response type) in country.poroto .

so first import “google/protobuf/Empty.proto”;

then use it like :

Collections

Collections, also essential in any project type, are supported in the Protobuf syntax with

the following two types:

• List
• Dictionary

for List “repeated” and for Dictionary “map<key,value>” keyword must be used.

Protocol buffer supported types and their default values with C# equivalent

Protocol buffer supported types and their default values with C# equivalent

The .NET types DateTimeOffset, DateTime, and TimeSpan have no equivalent in Protobuf languages, so Protobuf provides some Well-Known Types to manage these unsupported types in .NET.

gRPC date and time

C# sample and source project

Notice:

• Any input streamed message is typed IAsyncStreamReader<TMessage>
• Any output streamed message is typed IServerStreamWriter<TMessage>
• ServerContext parameter is the gRPC HttpContext containing all contextual information of the current request, even user data if a user is authenticated

source code is available in following repository

GitHub - ARFarokhi/gRPC: gRPC C# Sample With All Types of gRPC Services

Resource and more detail:

Beginning gRPC with ASP.NET Core 6 by Anthony Giretti — Apress

Images credit :

Beginning gRPC with ASP.NET Core 6 by Anthony Giretti — Apress