This crate provides support for dynamic protobuf messages. These are useful when the protobuf type definition is not known ahead of time.

The main entry points into the API of this crate are:

• [FileDescriptor] wraps a [FileDescriptorSet][prost_types::FileDescriptorSet] output by the protobuf compiler to provide an API for inspecting type definitions.
• [DynamicMessage] provides encoding, decoding and reflection of an arbitrary protobuf message definition described by a [MessageDescriptor].

Example - decoding

[DynamicMessage] does not implement [Default] since it needs a message descriptor to function. To decode a protobuf byte stream into an instance of this type, use [DynamicMessage::decode] to create a default value for the [MessageDescriptor] instance and merge into it:

use prost::Message;
use prost_types::FileDescriptorSet;
use prost_reflect::{DynamicMessage, FileDescriptor, Value};

let file_descriptor_set = FileDescriptorSet::decode(include_bytes!("file_descriptor_set.bin").as_ref()).unwrap();
let file_descriptor = FileDescriptor::new(file_descriptor_set).unwrap();
let message_descriptor = file_descriptor.get_message_by_name("package.MyMessage").unwrap();

let dynamic_message = DynamicMessage::decode(message_descriptor, b"\x08\x96\x01".as_ref()).unwrap();

assert_eq!(dynamic_message.get_field_by_name("foo").unwrap().as_ref(), &Value::I32(150));