Support for PBF response from Feature Service?

In the docs for arcgis-rest-feature-layer it says that the f parameter can take a value of "pbf" to return protobuf, but that this requires the use of rawResponse: true, and that you have to parse the resulting binary yourself. This community discussion thread from last year has people asking for the corresponding protocol description file (.proto) but it doesn’t sound like it’s been released.

I haven’t worked with protobuf extensively but my understanding was that you start with a schema in .proto format, pass it to a code generator like this one, then it gives you a helper class that can deserialize messages at runtime. Without knowing the format, I don’t think the guidance to “parse it yourself” is actually possible.

Can Esri either add native support for the pbf transport to arcgis-rest-feature-layer, or at least release an official schema file so we can parse the response ourselves?

[jbartley]

@thw0rted plan is to release this on github like you describe. Will ping you once we have it out.

[jbartley]

@thw0rted we finally got it out. Sorry it took so long.

https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-pbf