Kuestenlogik.Bowire.Protocol.TacticalApi

Bowire protocol plugin for Rheinmetall's TacticalAPI — a gRPC interface for situational-awareness systems. The plugin bundles the upstream service schema so users get a typed discovery sidebar and invoke pane against any TacticalAPI server, even when the server does not expose gRPC Server Reflection.

What it does

• Bundled schema — at build time the plugin downloads the upstream .proto files, compiles them with Grpc.Tools, and ships only the generated C# bindings. The Bowire sidebar can render the Situation service tree without uploading or hand-editing .proto files.
• Drop-in protocol tab — once installed, Bowire shows a TacticalAPI tab next to gRPC / REST / SignalR. Connect via bowire --url tacticalapi@<host:port>.
• Server-streaming aware — TacticalAPI's SubscribeSituationObjectEvents is server-streaming; the plugin surfaces it as a streaming method, not a unary call. Client-streaming and duplex aren't part of the TacticalAPI surface (no upstream RPC defines them) and the plugin rejects callers that try.
• mTLS via the shared __bowireMtls__ marker — same auth profile that REST / gRPC / Kafka / AMQP read; PEM cert + key + optional CA + allow-self-signed. The legacy _bowire:client-cert-pfx / _bowire:client-cert-password / _bowire:tls-skip-validation keys stay supported for callers that pinned against the pre-1.0 vocabulary.

Licensing — please read

This repository (the plugin source, generated bindings package, README, samples) is Apache-2.0.

The TacticalAPI .proto files at https://github.com/Rheinmetall/tacticalapi are licensed under EPL-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause (Rheinmetall Electronics GmbH). Vendoring those files into this Apache-2.0 repository would constitute redistribution under a different license, which the EPL does not permit. To keep both licenses honoured:

• The .proto files are downloaded at build time from the upstream repository into obj/tacticalapi-protos/ (gitignored, never committed).
• Grpc.Tools then compiles them into the assembly. Only the generated C# bindings ship in our NuGet package.
• The .proto source itself never enters our source tree or our package.

If you need air-gapped builds, pre-populate <repo-root>/artifacts/obj/Kuestenlogik.Bowire.Protocol.TacticalApi/<Configuration>/tacticalapi-protos/rheinmetall/tactical_api/v0/ with the six .proto files yourself (same names as upstream) and the build target will short-circuit because DownloadFile skips unchanged files.

The upstream pinned commit is e68546809d981cd649325dba4a9702c1a77a1a0b. The pin will move to a released tag once Rheinmetall cuts one.

Install

dotnet add package Kuestenlogik.Bowire.Protocol.TacticalApi

Bowire discovers the plugin automatically via assembly scanning — no extra registration code needed.

Use

bowire --url tacticalapi@my-situation-server:50051

Open the Bowire workbench, pick the TacticalAPI tab, and the four methods of the Situation service (SubscribeSituationObjectEvents, GetSituationObjects, AddOrUpdateSituationObjects, DeleteSituationObjects) appear in the sidebar.

Build

Building this repo requires outbound internet access so the proto-fetch target can reach raw.githubusercontent.com. GitHub Actions runners have it by default — fine for CI. For offline builds see the air-gapped instructions above.

dotnet restore
dotnet build -c Release
dotnet test  -c Release

Sample

A runnable sample lives in the central Bowire.Samples repo under src/Kuestenlogik.Bowire.Samples.TacticalApi — a self-contained mini gRPC server seeded with three MIL-2525C symbols (friendly / hostile / neutral surface contacts) so Bowire's TacticalAPI tab has live data to discover, invoke against, and subscribe to without a real Rheinmetall server in the lab.

Tests

Unit tests run on every CI build (descriptor walk, JSON parser edge cases, mTLS-marker handling, URL normalisation). The integration suite under tests/.../Integration carries [Trait("Category", "Docker")] and spins up the Bowire.Samples.TacticalApi server in a container for end-to-end discovery + invoke + stream round-trips. CI runs both passes; local dotnet test --filter "Category!=Docker" skips the container side.

What's in 1.0

• Bundled-schema discovery (no Server Reflection required on the target).
• Unary invoke + server-streaming subscribe for the whole upstream Situation service.
• Shared __bowireMtls__ marker integration alongside the legacy _bowire: keys.
• Plugin-tunable knobs: invocationDeadlineSeconds, streamIdleSeconds, allowSelfSignedCerts.
• IBowireMockEmitter so recordings tagged protocol: "tacticalapi" replay through bowire mock.

Upstream proto pinning

The bundled schema is fetched from a specific commit on Rheinmetall/tacticalapi (see the <TacticalApiCommit> property in the csproj). Rheinmetall publishes commits but no release tags as of 2026-05; pinning to a commit-SHA is the only reproducible option. The weekly check-upstream-protos.yml workflow watches the upstream HEAD and opens an issue when a new commit lands so the pin gets bumped deliberately rather than drifting.

Acknowledgements

The TacticalAPI specification, including all .proto files this plugin compiles against, is the work of Rheinmetall Electronics GmbH. Used here in accordance with the upstream EPL-2.0 / BSD-3-Clause licensing. See https://github.com/Rheinmetall/tacticalapi for the upstream project.

License

Apache-2.0