Middleware

Intercepting incoming requests

A middleware is a piece of code that intercepts an incoming request before this request reaches the target service. The same code also intercepts the outgoing response provided by the service before it's sent back to the caller.

At a more technical level, a middleware is a dispatcher that holds another dispatcher ("next") and calls dispatch on this next dispatcher as part of the implementation of its own dispatch method. The next dispatcher can be another middleware, a service, a router, or some other kind of dispatcher; as far as the middleware is concerned, it's just another dispatcher.

A middleware can include logic before calling dispatch on the next dispatcher (before the request is processed) and after calling dispatch on the next dispatcher (after it receives the response). A middleware can also short-circuit the dispatch pipeline by returning a cached response or by returning an error (a response with a status code other than Ok).

For example, a simple C# middleware could look like:

public class SimpleMiddleware : IDispatcher
{
    private readonly IDispatcher _next;

    public SimpleMiddleware(IDispatcher next) => _next = next;

    public async ValueTask<OutgoingResponse> DispatchAsync(
        IncomingRequest request,
        CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("before _next.DispatchAsync");
        OutgoingResponse response = await _next.DispatchAsync(request, cancellationToken);
        Console.WriteLine($"after _next.DispatchAsync; the response status code is {response.StatusCode}");
        return response;
    }
}

Installing a middleware

You can use a Router to create a dispatch pipeline and install one or more middleware in this dispatch pipeline.