Should opentelemetry-instrumentation-express propagate context?

[Nighttraveler]

Hi Guys,
We have 2 microservices one written java and one written in JS. From Java we propagate the context using the TextMapSetter setter it is working as expected; I can see the traceparent header in JS side.
My question is should opentelemetry-instrumentation-express propagate context?
I personally expected that it should work, since http instrumentation does it (at least from js to java) but looking at the src code there is no propagation there is only a const rpcMetadata = getRPCMetadata(context.active());
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js-contrib/blob/main/plugins/node/opentelemetry-instrumentation-express/src/instrumentation.ts#L199
Which is not context propagation.
So we will go with a express middleware using as base the example here https://opentelemetry.io/docs/instrumentation/js/propagation/
Is there another way to do it automatically not manually?
Thanks!

[Flarna]

express is a server framework using node built in http internally.

The OTel instrumentations reflect this split:

• HTTP instrumentation takes care of the basic HTTP part (extracting incoming trace context, set HTTP specific attributes,...)
• Express takes care of the parts on top of this specific to express (trace middlewares, set the HTTP route,...)

This split has the advantage that the basic HTTP part is reuseable for other frameworks like Hapi, Fastify,...

Using one of these server framework instrumentations without the http instrumentation makes usually no sense.