Working with multiple namespaces in generated code

[Brian Takita <br...@gmail.com>]

My company is creating a number of services that use thrift.

We are now wrestling with sharing structs across services.

Has anybody been able to share common structs from include files
across namespaces?

One issue I see is the code generator can only support support one
namespace. If a struct is included, it is put into the namespace of
the generated thrift file. This means another generated thrift file
with a different namespace will create a different class for that
common struct.

e.g.

_user.thrift

struct User {
}

user1.thrift

namespace rb User1
include '_user.thrift'

user2.thrift

namespace rb User2
include '_user.thrift'

Generating these files will cause User1::User and User2::User to be
created, which would cause problems in the app code (if an app were to
use user1.thrift and user2.thrift).

Has anybody gotten thrift to refer to the same User type across
multiple namespaces?

One way around this is to use a single namespace across all of the
thrift files in the entire company. Is that the recommended practice?

Thank you,
Brian

Re: Working with multiple namespaces in generated code

[Rush Manbert <ru...@manbert.com>]

On Aug 11, 2011, at 12:19 PM, Brian Takita wrote:

> My company is creating a number of services that use thrift.
> 
> We are now wrestling with sharing structs across services.
> 
> Has anybody been able to share common structs from include files
> across namespaces?
> 
> One issue I see is the code generator can only support support one
> namespace. If a struct is included, it is put into the namespace of
> the generated thrift file. This means another generated thrift file
> with a different namespace will create a different class for that
> common struct.
> 
> e.g.
> 
> _user.thrift
> 
> struct User {
> }
> 
> user1.thrift
> 
> namespace rb User1
> include '_user.thrift'
> 
> user2.thrift
> 
> namespace rb User2
> include '_user.thrift'
> 
> Generating these files will cause User1::User and User2::User to be
> created, which would cause problems in the app code (if an app were to
> use user1.thrift and user2.thrift).
> 
> Has anybody gotten thrift to refer to the same User type across
> multiple namespaces?
> 
> One way around this is to use a single namespace across all of the
> thrift files in the entire company. Is that the recommended practice?
> 
> Thank you,
> Brian

Hi Brian,

Do you refer to User structures in user1.thrift and user2.thrift as _user.User?

I'm guessing you might get a local version if you don't do that (although I thought it would be an error).

We do this all over the place in C++/Java.

- Rush