Fuchsia

Implement a FIDL client in Rust

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with writing and running a Fuchsia component and with implementing a FIDL server, which are both covered in the FIDL server tutorial. For the full set of FIDL tutorials, refer to the overview.

Overview

This tutorial implements a client for a FIDL protocol and runs it against the server created in the previous tutorial. The client in this tutorial is asynchronous. There is an alternate tutorial for synchronous clients.

If you want to write the code yourself, delete the following directories:

rm -r examples/fidl/rust/client/*

Create a hello world component

  1. Set up a hello world component in examples/fidl/rust/client. You can name the component echo-client, and give the package a name of echo-rust-client.

    Note: If necessary, refer back to the previous tutorial.

  2. Once you have created your component, ensure that the following works:

    fx set core.x64 --with //examples/fidl/rust/client

  3. Build the Fuchsia image:

    fx build

  4. In a separate terminal, run:

    fx serve

  5. In a separate terminal, run:

    fx shell run fuchsia-pkg://fuchsia.com/echo-rust-client#meta/echo-client.cmx

Edit GN dependencies

  1. Add the following dependencies to the rustc_binary:

    {%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client/BUILD.gn" region_tag="deps" %}

  2. Then, import them in main.rs:

    {%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client/src/main.rs" region_tag="imports" %}

These dependencies are explained in the server tutorial.

Edit component manifest

  1. Include the Echo protocol in the client component's sandbox by editing the component manifest in client.cmx.

    {%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client/client.cmx" %}

Connect to the server

The steps in this section explain how to add code to the main() function that connects the client to the server and makes requests to it.

Connect to the server

{%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client/src/main.rs" region_tag="main" highlight="3,4" %}

Under the hood, this call triggers a sequence of events that starts on the client and traces through the server code from the previous tutorial.

  • Initialize a client object, as well as a channel. The client object is bound to one end of the channel.
  • Makes a request to the component framework containing the name of the service to connect to, and the other end of the channel. The name of the service is obtained implicitly using the SERVICE_NAME of EchoMarker template argument, similarly to how the service path is determined on the server end.
  • This client object is returned from connect_to_service.

In the background, the request to the component framework gets routed to the server:

  • When this request is received in the server process, it wakes up the async::Executor executor and tells it that the ServiceFs task can now make progress and should be run.
  • The ServiceFs wakes up, sees the request available on the startup handle of the process, and looks up the name of the requested service in the list of (service_name, service_startup_func) provided through calls to add_service, add_fidl_service, etc. If a matching service_name exists, it calls service_startup_func with the provided channel to connect to the new service.
  • IncomingService::Echo is called with a RequestStream (typed-channel) of the Echo FIDL protocol that is registered with add_fidl_service. The incoming request channel is stored in IncomingService::Echo and is added to the stream of incoming requests. for_each_concurrent consumes the ServiceFs into a [Stream] of type IncomingService. A handler is run for each entry in the stream, which matches over the incoming requests and dispatches to the run_echo_server. The resulting futures from each call to run_echo_server are run concurrently when the ServiceFs stream is awaited.
  • When a request is sent on the channel, the channel the Echo service is becomes readable, which wakes up the asynchronous code in the body of run_echo_server.

Send requests to the server

The code makes two requests to the server:

  • An EchoString request
  • A SendString request
{%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client/src/main.rs" region_tag="main" highlight="6,7,8,9,10,11" %}

The call to EchoString returns a future, which resolves to the response returned by the server. The returned future will resolve to an error if there is either an error sending the request or receiving the response (e.g. when decoding the message, or if an epitaph was received).

On the other hand, the call to SendString returns a Result, since it is a fire and forget method. This method call will return an error if there was an issue sending the request.

The bindings reference describes how these proxy methods are generated, and the Fuchsia rustdoc includes documentation for the generated FIDL crates.

Handle incoming events

The code then waits for a single OnString event from the server:

{%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client/src/main.rs" region_tag="main" highlight="12,13,14,15" %}

This is done by taking the event stream from the client object, then waiting for a single event from it.

Run the client

If you run the client directly, it will not connect to the server correctly because the client does not automatically get the Echo protocol provided in its sandbox (in /svc). To get this to work, a launcher tool is provided that launches the server, creates a new Environment for the client that provides the server's protocol, then launches the client in it.

  1. Configure your GN build:

    fx set core.x64 --with //examples/fidl/rust/server --with //examples/fidl/rust/client --with //examples/fidl/test:echo-launcher

  2. Build the Fuchsia image:

    fx build

  3. Run the launcher by passing it the client URL, the server URL, and the protocol that the server provides to the client:

    fx shell run fuchsia-pkg://fuchsia.com/echo-launcher#meta/launcher.cmx fuchsia-pkg://fuchsia.com/echo-rust-client#meta/echo-client.cmx fuchsia-pkg://fuchsia.com/echo-rust-server#meta/echo-server.cmx fuchsia.examples.Echo

You should see the print output in the QEMU console (or using fx log).

[105541.570] 489493:489495> Listening for incoming connections...
[105541.573] 489493:489495> Received EchoString request for string "hello"
[105541.574] 489493:489495> Response sent successfully
[105541.574] 489272:489274> response: "hello"
[105541.575] 489493:489495> Received SendString request for string "hi"
[105541.575] 489493:489495> Event sent successfully
[105541.575] 489272:489274> Received OnString event for string "hi"