I’m using elixir-grpc to write a client for my Bloomberg API gRPC implementation. This is working quite well in Python, and I now want to bring the Bloomberg API to Elixir. Naturally timestamps are going to be necessary, but I don’t know how to use them in Elixir.

Elixir-grpc says it uses the protobuf library which in turn says that “since :protobuf version 0.14.0 we include all of the well known Google Protobuf modules” (which is strange since their latest release is 0.13.0).

Anyway I’m getting errors with Google.Protobuf.Timestamp. Here is my proto file that uses timestamps, and this successfully compiles to elixir code using protoc --elixir_out=plugins=grpc:../lib *.proto. You can see the output here, but when I try to do a simple ping/pong to the server, there’s a massive error which mentions that Google.Protobuf.Timestamp is not available:

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So in Python I would bring Google.Protobuf.Timestamp (and Struct and Empty) in like this:

from google.protobuf.struct_pb2 import Struct
from google.protobuf.timestamp_pb2 import Timestamp as protoTimestamp
from google.protobuf import empty_pb2

and then I could use them, but I don’t know how to do this in Elixir. Should I be generating my own code from the canonical Google.Protobuf.Timestamp proto files? This seems strange as I would think either elixir-grpc or protobuf would have done that already.