service-interceptors.md

title
Service Interceptors

Interceptors

Ring Request Processing

Any discussion of Interceptors should start with two important facts:

1. Interceptors are more complex to write than ring middlewares.
2. Why would anyone ever choose to embrace this additional complexity?

Let's start by first examining Ring's approach to request processing.

Ring middlewares embrace possibly the simplest abstraction for handling HTTP requests. The incoming request is modeled as a map of data, it is fed to a function which returns a response. The response is interpreted as a map of data, specific keys in the response are extracted and used to build an HTTP response which is sent back to the client. In this model, composition is achieved by using higher order functions of other functions. Conventionally, a wrap-functionality function is written which accepts a function of a request, and returns a new function of a request which exhibits the new composite functionality. Sessions are a good example; the wrap-session ring middleware accepts a handler function. It returns a new function which, when invoked, extracts data from the request to re-establish a map of session data, and associates this session data into the request map. This new request map is then passed to the wrapped handler, eventually producing a response. The response is examined for session data, which gets processed and eventually encoded in additional headers which will be sent back to the client. The modified response is returned out of the wrapping function, providing the composite behavior transparently to the wrapped function.

This strategy works well and it is possible to compose many different concerns in web server processing isolated from each other, but it has an important limitation. Because the mechanism of composition is composite evaluation, the total composition of processing a request must occur within the context of one thread. While it is possible to suspend the thread until other processing is finished, there's no convenient mechanism to dissociate the request's processing from the thread which starts servicing it, and resume it later with another different thread. Having a large number of passive requests which can be serviced at a later time (e.g. long polling, server sent events, requests waiting for status from a long running process) consumes a commensurately large number of threads. Maintaining context over the life of the request's processing makes use of closure scopes and the call stack to retain values calculated before request processing to be used after a response has been generated.

To summarize the qualities of ring request processing:

1. Composition is achieved by middlewares knowing about each other and conditionally calling the other middlewares they know about.

2. The information for chaining is hidden away in closure scope. An outside observer working with a ring middleware chain cannot see where it goes.

3. Responsibility of chaining behavior is diffused through all middlewares. Each middleware is responsible for calling the next in the chain.

4. Execution of the whole chain is bound to one thread.

Interceptor Execution Stages

Interceptors aim to explicitly solve the issue of request processing being coupled tightly to one thread. It does this with two mechanisms:

1. Interceptors operate on a context which explicitly retains all data associated with processing one request.

2. Interceptors allow the processing of one context to be paused in one thread, and resumed in another thread.

In order for interceptors to achieve this, they do not operate by invoking each other or by wrapping as higher ordered functions, but instead as members of an execution queue, where each interceptor is invoked and its return value retained to be invoked by the next interceptor. An ordered collection of interceptors to execute is referred to as a path. A path of interceptors will be executed by the interceptor engine by progressing through stages. There are five such stages of interceptor execution:

1. Enter
2. Leave
3. Error
4. Pause
5. Resume

The most conventional stages, and the ones end users are most likely to use, are enter and leave. As an interceptor path is processed, the enter stage of each interceptor is called with context in turn. This continues until calling the enter function of the last interceptor in the path. At this point, the leave stages of the interceptors are called in reverse order, that is, the first interceptor specified in its path will have its leave function called last.

Alternatively, an interceptor may call terminate, which will terminate execution of the path immediately and begin invoking leave stages. If the context contains a terminator predicate, as associated into a context with the terminate-when function, which returns true after the processing of any interceptor, the execution will terminate and the leave stages of interceptors will begin to be invoked.

The error stage is used for exception handling. If during any stage an uncaught exception is thrown, then the interceptor framework will catch the exception, and call the immediately preceding interceptor with the context and the caught exception. If this interceptor rethrows the exception, it will be caught again and provided to the next most immediately preceding interceptor. If the interceptor returns a context, processing will continue by calling the leave functions of preceding interceptors, as if the last interceptor in the path had been reached.

During execution, an interceptor may revert to the pause state (most often using the with-pause macro). In this case, each interceptor in the path which has previously had its enter function called, has their pause function called in reverse order. When all of the pause functions have been called, the body of with-pause executes with the context resulting from all of the pause invocations. Finally, interceptor processing terminates in that thread, but the context upon which the interceptors had been processing may be retained in memory.

Any thread, including the originating thread, or a different thread which receives the context, may then resume interceptor execution. On resuming, the resume functions of each interceptor are called (in the same order as the enter functions were called), until returning to the point in the path after the interceptor which paused. The enter functions of further interceptors in the path are invoked as if no pause had occurred. A single context may pause and resume an arbitrary number of times.

Request Processing Across Threads

This architecture allows for processing a single request across multiple threads. The thread which initially begins processing the request invokes the (with-pause) macro, which implicitly invokes the pause stage of all previous interceptors in the path, captures the resultant context, and binds it to the name provided in the binding form before executing the body. In the body, the context is made available to other threads through a concurrency construct (such as a concurrent identity like an atom, ref, or agent, or a concurrent processing form like a future or a delay). The body terminates, and the first thread terminates it's processing entirely. A new thread calls resume on the post pause context, which resumes interceptor execution with the context from the paused thread. The sse interceptor, which creates a channel for servers to communicate with clients, demonstrates this pattern.

Adding and Removing Interceptors

As an interceptor path is traversed, the context is continually re-evaluated to determine what stage of which interceptor should fire next. The return value of one interceptor may itself be a context with a path where more interceptors have been added, where the total interceptor path can be examined or chained, or where additional terminators can be introduced. The routing interceptor uses this feature to add additional interceptors to the interceptor path after examining the incoming request to find a matching path to dispatch requests to.

Compatibility with Ring

The Pedestal service infrastructure is designed to be Ring-compatible to the greatest extent possible. Specifically HTTP requests and responses are represented as Ring-style maps, but held in a wrapping Pedestal service context map.

All of the middlewares in Ring have been refactored so that in addition to the conventional wrap-xyz function for building a Ring-style middleware chain, there are xyz-request and xyz-response functions. These functions process requests and responses separately. The wrap-xys functions have been refactored to use the separate request and response processing functions.

The io.pedestal.http.ring-middlewares namespace defines interceptors that use the new Ring xyz-request and xyz-response functions, making all the standard Ring middlewares usable in Pedestal services.

Compared with Ring Middleware

Consider the nature of Pedestal Service's Interceptors as compared with Ring's Middlewares.

1. Composition is achieved by placing a number of interceptors into a queue for execution. This queue is traversed first in first out order.

2. Ordering and presence are clearly visible, it is data that can be worked with using all of Clojure's tools for working with seqs and PersistentQueues.

3. Responsibility of chaining behavior is delegated to the interceptor framework.

4. There exist tools for manipulating the chaining behavior at run time (e.g. terminating execution, enqueuing additional interceptors). Implementing consistent chaining behavior does not require diffusing that behavior through each interceptor.

5. Interceptors can know the entire queue of execution as it stands at their time of execution. It is possible to know what the last planned interceptor is before getting there. It's possible to know what the last interceptor which executed is. Most ring middlewares are only aware of what the immediately next middleware is.

6. Execution of the whole chain can be paused in one thread, then resumed in another different thread. A paused interceptor queue is data and does not consume a thread.

7. Interceptors do not need any information about any other interceptors to execute correctly. This information is available in the context, but it is not required.

Interceptor Debugging

The interceptor framework logs the entry of each interceptor's function, in each stage, at the debug log level. The interceptor framework logs the entry and the context it is currently processing at the entry of each interceptor's function in each stage at the trace log level. This is a useful way to determine what exactly is happening between the interceptor framework and the interceptors it is firing, but it is extremely verbose.

Definition

An interceptor is one instance of an Interceptor record or a map with :enter, :leave, :pause, :resume, and :error keys. An interceptor-fn is a function which returns an interceptor.

Pedestal includes macros for defining interceptors, and for defining interceptor-fns. These macros are conveniences for attaching a symbolic name and docstring to an interceptor.

There are functions and macros for constructing interceptors that deal with Ring requests and responses:

• The on-request function and defon-request macro define an interceptor with an enter function that takes a Ring request and returns a modified Ring request.

• The on-response function and defon-response macro define an interceptor with a leave function that takes a Ring response and returns a modified Ring response.

• The middleware function and defmiddleware macro define an interceptor with both an enter and a leave function.

There are equivalent functions and macros for building interceptors that deal directly with context maps, named before and defbefore, after and defafter, and around and defaround.

Existing Ring handler functions used at the end of middleware chains that take a request and return a response can be referred to directly from a service's route table. The routing infrastructure will wrap them in an interceptor using the handler function. Alternatively, you can wrap them yourself using the defhandler macro.

These macros also flag the vars they create with metadata identifying them as either interceptors or interceptor-fns. Other pieces in the Pedestal framework make use of this metadata to make intelligent decisions about how to work with these vars.

Porting Ring Code

You can port Ring code to Pedestal by:

• Reusing handler functions directly in a route-table (or by wrapping them in a call to handler or defhandler)

• Refactoring middleware functions into two separate functions, one that modifies a request and one that modifies a response and using them to define an interceptor using the on-request, middleware or on-response functions or the defon-request, defmiddleware or defon-response macros.

  You can build an interceptor that works directly with a context map, providing access to both Ring maps.

• If you are using Compojure for routing requests, rewrite your route definitions using the terse routing format (see Service Routing). Any Ring middlewares that run before your Compojure routes should be replaced by interceptors that run before routing. Any middlewares specified in your Compojure routes should be replaced by interceptors referenced directly in your route definitions. There are interceptors provided for all the existing Ring middlewares. They are defined in the io.pedestal.http.ring-middlewares namespace.