`decode()` fails silently when passing in a wrong type

[tomergg]

protobuf.js version: 6.6.5

When passing in a ByteBuffer instead of a Uint8Array, decode fails silently and return an "empty" message. Calling toObject on the message will return an empty object. The expected is to validate the input parameters and throw an exception if it's of an invalid type.

try {
  const pbNotifications = pbRoot.lookup('Notifications');
  const data = new ByteBuffer(...);
  const notification = pbNotifications.Notification.decode(data).toObject();
} catch (error) {
  logger(error);
}

As a side note. I came across this bug after switching from v5 to v6. A part of the code, where the test coverage was not ideal, was failing silently. It was only discovered at functional QA time.

[dcodeIO]

I intentionally omitted these assertions for perf reasons because decode is called implicitly for each sub-message, which'd then execute the assertion over and over again. For example, if you have a .proto like ...

message Outer {
   repeated Inner foo = 1;
}
message Inner {
}

... then you'd call Outer.decode(...) yourself, which implicitly calls Inner.decode(...) for each repeated element of foo and so on. Furthermore, the assertion, in this case, would have to check for multiple types: Reader, Buffer under node, Uint8Array in modern respectively Array in older browsers.

Your request is a valid issue, though Ideally, there'd be an unchecked _decode for internal use and a checked decode for the API or something like that (also in static code). and it should be possible to figure something out when moving the check to Reader.create.

[tomergg]

Thank you again for the quick and detailed answer

Your request is a valid issue, though. Ideally, there'd be an unchecked _decode for internal use and a checked decode for the API or something like that (also in static code).

This sounds like a good solution. The issue is not blocking me in anyway. I quickly fixed my code and it's working well. It was an easy thing to miss moving from v5 to v6, since v5 used ByteBuffer. When this is addressed I think it would make it slightly easier to upgrade.

BTW,
v6.6.5 came just in time. We have a code freeze today.
Thank you again.

[dcodeIO]

Should be fixed in master.