Use messages with dynamic objects

I wanted to pass some message through grpc with dynamic data, something like this:

public class Message
{
    // some other properties
   ...
   public object Payload { get; set; }
}

If I understood right (not sure), in protobuf it could be done with “Any”, something like this:

import "google/protobuf/any.proto";

message Message {
   google.protobuf.Any payload = 1;
}

How can I pack/unpack some object to this “Any” type and vice-versa? For some reason Protobuf c# documentation only shows examples with java and c++ https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/csharp/class/google/protobuf/well-known-types/any As a workaround I could just pass some json in this payload, but then I would lose performance by performing two different serializations. Thank you for the help.

[JamesNK]

Yes. Or just a string field with JSON. Or a bytes field if the dynamic payload is binary.

[JamesNK]

I don’t know your system or your performance requirements. Measure and find out.

btw, there are now docs about how to work with unstructured data - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/grpc/protobuf?view=aspnetcore-6.0#unstructured-and-conditional-messages