Supporting protofile descriptor to deserialize protobuf messages and masking a field in the protobuf message definition

[SamsadSajid]

Context

Currently, to deserialize a protobuf message, Kakfa UI supports the packaging of the actual proto definitions in the configuration. [Reference]

This is a very good and super helpful feature. However, for a large number of proto files, there are some repetitive tasks involved.

Proto file descriptor

A proto file descriptor is a binary file after compiling the original proto definitions. One can learn at runtime the message definitions, types, and fields annotation of the proto messages from the file descriptor.

Feature request: The usage of the Proto file descriptor in Kafka UI

Currently, in Kafka UI configuration, one needs to package the protobuf files in the protobufFilesDir setting and create a map of topic name to topic type in the protobufMessageNameByTopic setting.

For a large number of proto files, this can be a bit repetitive task. Whereas the proto file descriptor already contains all the information needed to create the deserialization from a protobuf message and masking fields in that message. Utilizing the descriptor file:

1. will remove the creation of manual mapping in the Kafka UI configuration
2. will remove the human TOIL
3. will make Kafka UI more flexible
4. will make Kafka UI more powerful
5. will make Kafka UI more appealing to the users

Hence, I am raising this feature request with the lovely Kafka UI team. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts folks. 😃