now that I’ve managed to get things to compile in C++ with a recent pact_ffi version, the next hurdle seems to be the pact-cplusplus interface doesn’t actually seem to trigger anything in the plugin interface. I have figured out a workaround by calling

pactffi_using_plugin

and passing in the handle, and it actually loads the plugin and calls

InitPlugin

, but now I’m at a loss… My assumption is the pact-cplusplus is so far out of date it doesn’t actually call any of the methods in the ffi interface to result in the plugin being called with

ConfigureInteraction

,

StartMockServer

, etc. Is that a correct assumption? Where can I find some example code to follow for setting up a transport plugin, so I can figure out what the C++ wrapper should look like to work with plugins?

raw ffi calls, in dotnet (not part of an official library) consumer test https://github.com/YOU54F/pact-dotnet-ffi-plugins/blob/main/Grpc/GrpcGreeterClient.Tests/GrpcGreeterClientTest.cs provider test https://github.com/YOU54F/pact-dotnet-ffi-plugins/blob/main/Grpc/GrpcGreeter.Tests/GrpcGreeterTest.cs

Thanks, I tried poking around in pact-js and the rust consumer but didn’t get very far 😄 That C# code looks like just what I need for now!

awesome. and yeah it’s definitely a maze for sure! sometimes you just need to see the few calls you need to make and you can build out your mental model from there.

Is this page still valid btw? https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-plugins/blob/main/docs/protocol-plugin-design.md I’m following the approach in the

GrpcGreeterClientTest.cs

that sets the interaction_content, and that seems to start the mock server with the specified content in the request payload for the

StartMockServer

rpc. I was expecting

ConfigureInteraction

to be called at some point so I can set up the expected requests/responses? I stripped the “pact:proto” and “pact:proto-service” btw, not sure how relevant that is, since it’s not a grpc service being tested.

this is the consumer facing dsl for the pact framework. the configureinteraction is a plugin method and that is being dealt with by the pact-protobuf-plugin for a course of plugin design you can follow https://docs.pact.io/plugins/workshops/create-a-plugin/intro where you will see those methods implemented, and you will end up with a plugin you can call from your pact tests

Somehow I completely missed that course… thanks for pointing that out! I was only aware of the pages here https://docs.pact.io/implementation_guides/pact_plugins

We didn't think anyone was using the C++ version of Pact, it has been very quite for years.