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.
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 synchronous. There is an alternate tutorial for asynchronous clients.
If you want to write the code yourself, delete the following directories:
rm -r examples/fidl/rust/client_sync/*
Set up a hello world component in examples/fidl/rust/client_sync. You can name the component echo-client, and give the package a name of echo-rust-client-sync.
Note: If necessary, refer back to the previous tutorial.
Once you have created your component, ensure that the following works:
fx set core.x64 --with //examples/fidl/rust/client_sync
Build the Fuchsia image:
fx build
In a separate terminal, run:
fx serve
In a separate terminal, run:
fx shell run fuchsia-pkg://fuchsia.com/echo-rust-client-sync#meta/echo-client.cmx
Add the following dependencies to the rustc_binary:
{%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client/BUILD.gn" region_tag="deps" %}
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.
The one new dependency is fuchsia-zircon, which is a crate containing type safe bindings for making Zircon kernel syscalls. In this example, the crate is used to create a channel.
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_sync/client.cmx" %}
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.
{%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client_sync/src/main.rs" region_tag="main" highlight="2,3" %}
This channel will be used to communicate between the client and server.
{%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client_sync/src/main.rs" region_tag="main" highlight="4,5,6,7,8" %}
connect_channel_to_service will bind the provided channel end to the specified service. 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:
SERVICE_NAME of EchoMarker template argument, similarly to how the service path is determined on the server end.connect_to_service.In the background, the request to the component framework gets routed to the server:
async::Executor executor and tells it that the ServiceFs task can now make progress and should be run.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.Echo service is becomes readable, which wakes up the asynchronous code in the body of run_echo_server.Note: If any requests are sent before the server end of the channel is bound to the server, these requests are buffered by the kernel. The server then reads these requests as soon as the server is initialized.
The code makes two requests to the server:
EchoString requestSendString request{%includecode gerrit_repo="fuchsia/fuchsia" gerrit_path="examples/fidl/rust/client/src/main.rs" region_tag="main" highlight="10,11,12,13,14,15" %}
The call to echo_string will block until a response is received from the server, and therefore it takes a timeout argument as the last parameter.
On the other hand, the call to send_string does not have a timeout parameter since SendString does not have a response. With the current server implementation, an OnString event will be sent to the client after this request is received. However, the synchronous Rust bindings do not have support for handling events.
The [bindings reference][bindings-ref] describes how these methods are generated, and the [Fuchsia rustdoc][rustdoc] includes documentation for the generated FIDL crates.
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.
Configure your GN build:
fx set core.x64 --with //examples/fidl/rust/server --with //examples/fidl/rust/client_sync --with //examples/fidl/test:echo-launcher
Build the Fuchsia image:
fx build
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-sync#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).
[109100.005] 505615:505617> Listening for incoming connections... [109100.099] 505615:505617> Received EchoString request for string "hello" [109100.100] 505615:505617> Response sent successfully [109100.100] 505864:505866> response: "hello" [109100.100] 505615:505617> Received SendString request for string "hi" [109100.100] 505615:505617> error sending event [109100.100] 505615:505617> [109100.100] 505615:505617> Caused by: [109100.100] 505615:505617> 0: A server encountered an IO error writing a FIDL response to a channel: PEER_CLOSED [109100.100] 505615:505617> 1: PEER_CLOSED
The server prints a PEER_CLOSED error when it tries to send the event, because the client terminates immediately after sending the SendString request without waiting for the OnString event. This is expected since synchronous clients cannot handle events. To see how to handle events, try following the async client tutorial instead