Feedback Wanted: Proposed API: SetWebRequest

[willnewrelic]

Hi All,

For the next agent release, we are considering a new Transaction method called SetWebRequest. This method allow consumers to provide request information without having an *http.Request, or without having the request at the beginning of the Transaction. We're thinking it could look something like this:

type Transaction interface {
    // ... other methods

    // SetWebRequest adds request attributes and marks the transaction as a
    // web transaction.
    SetWebRequest(Request) error
}

// Request provides request information to Transaction.SetWebRequest.
type Request interface {
    Header() http.Header
    URL() *url.URL
    Method() string
    Transport() TransportType
}

What do you think?

It would be nice to allow consumers to provide a *http.Request to SetWebRequest. Possible ways of making this happen:

1. We could change the Transaction.SetWebRequest parameter to an interface{} (which could be either a Request or a *http.Request). Unfortunately, this would lose strong type safety.

2. We could have a func NewRequest(*http.Request) Request helper function do the necessary transformation. This would look something like this:

txn.SetWebRequest(newrelic.NewRequest(req))

What would be a better name for the NewRequest helper?

3. Or we could have two Transaction methods: one which takes a Request and another which takes a *http.Request.

4. We could change the Transaction.SetWebRequest parameter to an *http.Request, and ask consumers to convert their requests into *http.Request format. Is it easier to convert into a *http.Request, or to satisfy the Request interface? The Request interface makes it explicit which fields we will access, which is nice.

This will satisfy: #19

[willnewrelic]

This functionality has now been released in 2.2.0!

Check it out!

https://godoc.org/github.com/newrelic/go-agent#WebRequest