Non-generic AddEndpointAsync

[mikoskinen]

Proposed change

AFAIK the current AddEndpointAsync implementation only has a generic version. So the endpoint is always typed.

Would it be possible to support a scenario where we could create an untyped endpoint? I would be happy if we could just get the Msg and then could manually convert the type.

Use case

We have some service endpoint's which may receive XML-data. In these cases we would like to use Linq to XML types like XDocument, XElement etc. to loop the data.

Contribution

I could perhaps help with the code.

[mtmk]

At the moment you can use NatsMemoryOwner<byte> (which uses memory pool when default serializer is in use) as your generic type to achieve what you described:

using System.Text;
using NATS.Client.Core;
using NATS.Client.Services;

var nats = new NatsConnection();
var svc = new NatsSvcContext(nats);

await using var s1 = await svc.AddServiceAsync("s1", "1.0.0");

await s1.AddEndpointAsync<NatsMemoryOwner<byte>>(
    name: "greet",
    handler: async msg =>
    {
        if (msg.Exception != null)
        {
            Console.Error.WriteLine("Error: " + msg.Exception.Message);
        }
        else
        {
            using var memoryOwner = msg.Data;

            // use custom message serialization
            var message = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(memoryOwner.Span);

            Console.WriteLine($"Received: {message}");
            await msg.ReplyAsync($"you said '{message}'");
        }
    });

Console.ReadLine();

//
// > nats req greet Hello
// 14:02:35 Sending request on "greet"
// 14:02:35 Received with rtt 904µs
// you said 'Hello'
//

Another option is to implement your own serializer: https://nats-io.github.io/nats.net.v2/documentation/serialization.html#using-custom-serializer

[mikoskinen]

Excellent, thank you for the quick help.

[mtmk]

thanks @mikoskinen 🙏 if you feel we can improve the api please feel free to make suggestions 💯 in a new issue or reopen this one.