Migrating to google-cloud-language 1.0

The 1.0 release of the google-cloud-language client is a significant upgrade based on a next-gen code generator, and includes substantial interface changes. Existing code written for earlier versions of this library will likely require updates to use this version. This document describes the changes that have been made, and what you need to do to update your usage.

To summarize:

  • The library has been broken out into three libraries. The new gems google-cloud-language-v1 and google-cloud-language-v1beta2 contain the actual client classes for versions V1 and V1beta2 of the Natural Language service, and the gem google-cloud-language now simply provides a convenience wrapper. See Library Structure for more info.
  • The library uses a new configuration mechanism giving you closer control over endpoint address, network timeouts, and retry. See Client Configuration for more info. Furthermore, when creating a client object, you can customize its configuration in a block rather than passing arguments to the constructor. See Creating Clients for more info.
  • Previously, positional arguments were used to indicate required arguments. Now, all method arguments are keyword arguments, with documentation that specifies whether they are required or optional. Additionally, you can pass a proto request object instead of separate arguments. See Passing Arguments for more info.
  • Previously, clients reported RPC errors by raising instances of Google::Gax::GaxError and its subclasses. Now, RPC exceptions are of type Google::Cloud::Error and its subclasses. See Handling Errors for more info.
  • Some classes have moved into different namespaces. See Class Namespaces for more info.

Library Structure

Older 0.x releases of the google-cloud-language gem were all-in-one gems that included potentially multiple clients for multiple versions of the Natural Language service. The Google::Cloud::Language.new factory method would return you an instance of a Google::Cloud::Language::V1::LanguageServiceClient object for the V1 version of the service, or a Google::Cloud::Language::V1beta2::LanguageServiceClient object for the V1beta2 version of the service. All these classes were defined in the same gem.

With the 1.0 release, the google-cloud-language gem still provides factory methods for obtaining clients. (The method signatures will have changed. See Creating Clients for details.) However, the actual client classes have been moved into separate gems, one per service version. The Google::Cloud::Language::V1::LanguageService::Client class, along with its helpers and data types, is now part of the google-cloud-language-v1 gem. Similarly, the Google::Cloud::Language::V1beta2::LanguageService::Client class is part of the google-cloud-language-v1beta2 gem.

For normal usage, you can continue to install the google-cloud-language gem (which will bring in the versioned client gems as dependencies) and continue to use factory methods to create clients. However, you may alternatively choose to install only one of the versioned gems. For example, if you know you will only V1 of the service, you can install google-cloud-language-v1 by itself, and construct instances of the Google::Cloud::Language::V1::LanguageService::Client client class directly.

Client Configuration

In older releases, if you wanted to customize performance parameters or low-level behavior of the client (such as credentials, timeouts, or instrumentation), you would pass a variety of keyword arguments to the client constructor. It was also extremely difficult to customize the default settings.

With the 1.0 release, a configuration interface provides control over these parameters, including defaults for all instances of a client, and settings for each specific client instance. For example, to set default credentials and timeout for all Language V1 clients:

Google::Cloud::Language::V1::LanguageService::Client.configure do |config|
  config.credentials = "/path/to/credentials.json"
  config.timeout = 10.0
end

Individual RPCs can also be configured independently. For example, to set the timeout for the analyze_sentiment call:

Google::Cloud::Language::V1::LanguageService::Client.configure do |config|
  config.rpcs.analyze_sentinment.timeout = 20.0
end

Defaults for certain configurations can be set for all Language versions globally:

Google::Cloud::Language.configure do |config|
  config.credentials = "/path/to/credentials.json"
  config.timeout = 10.0
end

Finally, you can override the configuration for each client instance. See the next section on Creating Clients for details.

Creating Clients

In older releases, to create a client object, you would use the Google::Cloud::Language.new class method. Keyword arguments were available to select a service version and to configure parameters such as credentials and timeouts.

With the 1.0 release, use the Google::Cloud::Language.language_service class method to create a client object. You may select a service version using the :version keyword argument. However, other configuration parameters should be set in a configuration block when you create the client.

Old:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.new credentials: "/path/to/credentials.json"

New:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.language_service do |config|
  config.credentials = "/path/to/credentials.json"
end

The configuration block is optional. If you do not provide it, or you do not set some configuration parameters, then the default configuration is used. See Client Configuration.

Passing Arguments

In older releases, required arguments would be passed as positional method arguments, while most optional arguments would be passed as keyword arguments.

With the 1.0 release, all RPC arguments are passed as keyword arguments, regardless of whether they are required or optional. For example:

Old:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.new

document = {
  content: "I love API calls!",
  type: Google::Cloud::Language::V1::Document::Type::PLAIN_TEXT
}
encoding = Google:Cloud::Language::V1::EncodingType::UTF8

# Document is a positional argument, while encoding_type is a keyword argument.
response = client.analyze_sentiment document, encoding_type: encoding

New:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.language_service

document = {
  content: "I love API calls!",
  type: Google::Cloud::Language::V1::Document::Type::PLAIN_TEXT
}
encoding = Google:Cloud::Language::V1::EncodingType::UTF8

# Both document and encoding_type are keyword arguments.
response = client.analyze_sentiment document: document, encoding_type: encoding

In the 1.0 release, it is also possible to pass a request object, either as a hash or as a protocol buffer.

New:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.language_service

request = Google::Cloud::Language::V1::AnalyzeSentimentRequest.new(
  document: {
    content: "I love API calls!",
    type: Google::Cloud::Language::V1::Document::Type::PLAIN_TEXT
  },
  encoding_type: Google:Cloud::Language::V1::EncodingType::UTF8
)

# Pass a request object as a positional argument:
response = client.analyze_sentiment request

Finally, in older releases, to provide call options, you would pass a Google::Gax::CallOptions object with the :options keyword argument. In the 1.0 release, pass call options using a second set of keyword arguments.

Old:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.new

document = {
  content: "I love API calls!",
  type: Google::Cloud::Language::V1::Document::Type::PLAIN_TEXT
}

options = Google::Gax::CallOptions.new timeout: 10.0

response = client.analyze_sentiment document, options: options

New:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.language_service

document = {
  content: "I love API calls!",
  type: Google::Cloud::Language::V1::Document::Type::PLAIN_TEXT
}
encoding = Google:Cloud::Language::V1::EncodingType::UTF8

# Use a hash to wrap the normal call arguments (or pass a request object), and
# then add further keyword arguments for the call options.
response = client.analyze_sentiment(
  { document: document, encoding_type: encoding },
  timeout: 10.0
)

Handling Errors

The client reports standard gRPC error codes by raising exceptions. In older releases, these exceptions were located in the Google::Gax namespace and were subclasses of the Google::Gax::GaxError base exception class, defined in the google-gax gem. However, these classes were different from the standard exceptions (subclasses of Google::Cloud::Error) thrown by other client libraries such as google-cloud-storage.

The 1.0 client library now uses the Google::Cloud::Error exception hierarchy, for consistency across all the Google Cloud client libraries. In general, these exceptions have the same name as their counterparts from older releases, but are located in the Google::Cloud namespace rather than the Google::Gax namespace.

Old:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.new

document = {
  content: "I love API calls!",
  type: Google::Cloud::Language::V1::Document::Type::PLAIN_TEXT
}
encoding = Google:Cloud::Language::V1::EncodingType::UTF8

begin
  response = client.analyze_sentiment document, encoding_type: encoding
rescue Google::Gax::Error => e
  # Handle exceptions that subclass Google::Gax::Error
end

New:

client = Google::Cloud::Language.language_service

document = {
  content: "I love API calls!",
  type: Google::Cloud::Language::V1::Document::Type::PLAIN_TEXT
}
encoding = Google:Cloud::Language::V1::EncodingType::UTF8

begin
  response = client.analyze_sentiment document: document, encoding_type: encoding
rescue Google::Cloud::Error => e
  # Handle exceptions that subclass Google::Cloud::Error
end

Class Namespaces

In older releases, the client object was of class Google::Cloud::Language::V1::LanguageServiceClient. In the 1.0 release, the client object is of class Google::Cloud::Language::V1::LanguageService::Client. Note that most users will use the Google::Cloud::Language.language_service factory method to create instances of the client object, so you may not need to reference the actual class directly. See Creating Clients.

In older releases, the credentials object was of class Google::Cloud::Language::V1::Credentials. In the 1.0 release, the credentials object is of class Google::Cloud::Language::V1::LanguageService::Credentials. Again, most users will not need to reference this class directly. See Client Configuration.