How to access JSON serialized types?

[willsoto]

Hello! This is a great project but there is one thing I am running into. Didn't want to file an issue since I don't think it's a bug and I've seen some other issues / discussion around it.

Basically the problem is that I am not sure what type I should be using from Buf trying to use the protobuf objects, say as a parameter into a component.

Here is a simple example:

Given the following

message Foo {
  string id = 1;
  google.protobuf.Timestamp timestamp = 2;
}

the type I get for PlainMessage<Foo> is basically

import { PlainMessage, Timestamp } from '@bufbuild/protobuf';

interface Foo {
  id: string;
  timestamp: PlainMessage<Timestamp>;
}

But what I am seeing at runtime (as a type) is the following

interface Foo {
  id: string;
  timestamp: string; // ISO timestamp  
}

A little additional info:

I am not using any of the connect clients. Due to the way our system is setup, we have regular old gRPC on the servers and still need to use @grpc/grpc-js on the "client" - we use Next.js so it's all server-to-server actually. This issue really came in handy for getting that working. So our setup will make the gRPC request server-to-server and then return the response via tRPC which I assume is calling toJSON since I can see on the server that the Timestamp is still an object with seconds and nanos.

I am using PlainMessage because that is what I saw suggested here and here.

Any thoughts or suggestions on this? Please let me know if I can provide any additional information or if anything about my description is unclear.

[willsoto]

Related issues:

• Message serialization and classes vs. plain javascript objects with React Server Components #505
• More info on using the generated definitions? #291