Today’s focus is going to be on message handlers (or, to be precise, DelegatingHandlers) in ASP.NET Web API. If you are familiar with WCF you can surely recall them – used to be called DelegatingChannels at some point – but the purpose has been the same all along, to provide the first (or last, depending whether you look at requests or responses) extendibility point in your Web API applications. You stack up as many message handlers on top of each other as you wish, and the request will travel through all of them.
This, in turn, gives us developers a possibility to process/alter/modify/decline the incoming HTTP request before it reaches the HttpControllerDispatcher. Then, when the controller creates the response, it goes through the same chain of message handlers again, so we can tamper with the response. One example of the applicability of this is that message handlers are a perfect place to address security related matters i.e. integrating OAuth.
The plan for today is to show how DelegatingHandlers are used by building a functionality that checks for an API key on an incoming API request and then logs all requests and responses, thus allowing you to track the usage of your API.
Continue Reading