ent/doc/md/tutorial-grpc-optional-fields.md

id, title, sidebar_label

id	title	sidebar_label
grpc-optional-fields	Optional Fields	Optional Fields

A common issue with Protobufs is that the way that nil values are represented: a zero-valued primitive field isn't encoded into the binary representation, this means that applications cannot distinguish between zero and not-set for primitive fields.

To support this, the Protobuf project supports some Well-Known types called "wrapper types". For example, the wrapper type for a bool, is called google.protobuf.BoolValue and is defined as:

// Wrapper message for `bool`.
//
// The JSON representation for `BoolValue` is JSON `true` and `false`.
message BoolValue {
  // The bool value.
  bool value = 1;
}

When entproto generates a Protobuf message definition, it uses these wrapper types to represent "Optional" ent fields.

Let's see this in action, modifying our ent schema to include an optional field:

// Fields of the User.
func (User) Fields() []ent.Field {
	return []ent.Field{
		field.String("name").
			Unique().
			Annotations(
				entproto.Field(2),
			),
		field.String("email_address").
			Unique().
			Annotations(
				entproto.Field(3),
			),
		field.String("alias").
			Optional().
			Annotations(entproto.Field(4)),
	}
}

Re-running go generate ./..., observe that our Protobuf definition for User now looks like:

message User {
  int32 id = 1;

  string name = 2;

  string email_address = 3;

  google.protobuf.StringValue alias = 4; // <-- this is new 

  repeated Category administered = 5;
}

The generated service implementation also utilize this field. Observe in entpb_user_service.go:

func (svc *UserService) createBuilder(user *User) (*ent.UserCreate, error) {
	m := svc.client.User.Create()
	if user.GetAlias() != nil {
		userAlias := user.GetAlias().GetValue()
		m.SetAlias(userAlias)
	}
	userEmailAddress := user.GetEmailAddress()
	m.SetEmailAddress(userEmailAddress)
	userName := user.GetName()
	m.SetName(userName)
	for _, item := range user.GetAdministered() {
		administered := int(item.GetId())
		m.AddAdministeredIDs(administered)
	}
	return m, nil
}

To use the wrapper types in our client code, we can use helper methods supplied by the wrapperspb package to easily build instances of these types. For example in cmd/client/main.go:

func randomUser() *entpb.User {
	return &entpb.User{
		Name:         fmt.Sprintf("user_%d", rand.Int()),
		EmailAddress: fmt.Sprintf("user_%d@example.com", rand.Int()),
		Alias:        wrapperspb.String("John Doe"),
	}
}