Visualization of gRPC and Protocol Buffers

Question

We are close to 100 .proto files, where everyone can define about 10 IDL structures (for example, service or message ).

Is there a way to visualize them, including links (from one file to another). For example, similar to the UML class diagram.

Perhaps there is a custom visualizer for Java / C ++.

Quote from https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview

Protocol buffers are now Google lingua franca for data - during recording, there are 48162 different types of messages defined in the Google code tree in 12 183 .proto files.

I wonder how they handle this.

Answer 1

I have a similar problem: I am trying to read a huge number of protobuffs and understand the connection between them. It would be very helpful to create their visual representation to see what is available and how they are related to each other.

I found several projects, maybe they will help someone:

• p rotoc-gene-AML
• protobuf2uml
• Scheme-AML
• protoc gene dock

Although for me they did not work for various reasons, but you can try them.

Answer 2

https://github.com/seamia/protodot

• Super easy to use and fairly powerful tool
• Creates .dot files (and .svg / .png if graphviz installed) from .proto
• Detects all dependencies and does not require their presence
• Filters by specified resources (messages, rpcs, services, transfers)
• Can generate import dependency graph