Description for traceId, spanId, parentId is wrong

[open-telemetry]

Description for traceId, spanId, parentId is wrong

[obecny]

I have created issue there too let's see who will do the fix ;)

[tigrannajaryan]

It should not be limited to base64. It is declared as bytes and any byte sequence should work.

[obecny]

but it doesn't work with bytes, only with base64

[Oberon00]

Doesn't work with what? That' probably the receiver's fault, not the protocol's. So this issue is probably in the wrong repository.

[obecny]

the proto format says that traceId, spanId and parentId should be bytes, but if you send the data using bytes instead of base64, the opentelemetry collector doesn't work. So this is either wrong description here or opentelemetry collector bug.

[Oberon00]

I'd say, by definition, the opentelemetry collector has a bug. 😃

[bogdandrutu]

@obecny Are you using the JSON with grpc gateway? If yes that is not a bug is the proto limitation, see https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/issues/129

[bogdandrutu]

See here as well https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#json - bytes are mapped as base64 in JSON representation.

[obecny]

@bogdandrutu yes grpc with json. I don't know about the limitation etc. but when I was implementing this it was saying use bytes which I did, but then the error from collector was not enough to be able to understand what is the problem. We can argue where is the bug, but simply adding some explanation in proto repo that with json you should use base64 would probably save some hours of debugging and trying to figure out what's the problem and if either format is wrong or the receiver - which btw has even much worse documentation and is outdated :).

[bogdandrutu]

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector#980 (comment) will resolve this issue.