DevOps Articles

Practical API Design at Netflix, Part 1: Using Protobuf FieldMask

By Alex Borysov, Ricky Gardiner Some response fields can be expensive to compute, some fields can require remote calls to other services.

A FieldMask message contains a single field named paths, which is used to specify fields that should be returned by a read operation or modified by an update operation.

This method utilizes the compiled message definitions to convert field numbers to field names and creates a FieldMask.

For example, a method that returns all top-level fields based on FieldMask and FieldDescriptor, a method to return if a field is present in a FieldMask, etc.