ASP.

Net Core –Handling requests

with the middleware pipeline
Kamal Beydoun
Lebanese University – Faculty of Sciences I
[email protected]
 Middleware pipeline
The middleware pipeline is one of the most important parts of
configuration for defining how your application behaves and how it
responds to requests.
Understanding how to build and compose middleware is key to adding
functionality to your applications.

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 What is middleware?
 In ASP.NET Core, middleware is C# classes that can handle an HTTP
request or response.
Middleware can:
 Handle an incoming HTTP request by generating an HTTP response.
 Process an incoming HTTP request, modify it, and pass it on to another piece of
middleware.
 Process an outgoing HTTP response, modify it, and pass it on to either another
piece of middleware, or the ASP.NET Core web server.
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 Pipeline

This arrangement, where a

piece of middleware can call
another piece of middleware,
which in turn can call another,
and so on, is referred to as a
pipeline.

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 Example

A key point to glean from this is

that the pipeline is bidirectional.

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 HttpContext object
The ASP.NET Core web server constructs an HttpContext, which the
ASP.NET Core application uses as a sort of storage box for a single
request.
 details of the original HTTP request and other configuration details
All middleware has access to the HttpContext for a request.

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 Combining middleware in a pipeline
How to create a middleware pipeline by composing small
components together ??
Using standard middleware components
create a holding page
serve static files from a folder on disk.

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 WelcomePageMiddleware
• WelcomePageMiddleware
is designed to quickly
provide a sample page when
you’re first developing an
application.

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 Startup.cs
• Configure method of Startup by adding middleware to an
IApplicationBuilder object.

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 Handling static files
Most web applications, including those with dynamic content,
serve a number of pages using static files.
Images, JavaScript, and CSS stylesheets are normally saved to disk
during development and are served up when requested, normally as
part of a full HTML page request.

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In this example, an image called moon.jpg exists in the
wwwroot folder. When you request the file using the /moon.jpg
path, it’s loaded and returned as the response to the request. .
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 `

• If the user requests a file that doesn’t exist in the wwwroot folder
• a 404 HTTP error code response will be sent to the user’s browser, which will show its default “File
Not Found” page
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• If the file doesn’t exist, then the request effectively passes through the static file middleware unchanged.
• ASP.NET Core effectively adds an automatic “dummy” piece of middleware to the end of the pipeline.
• This middleware always returns a 404 response if it’s called.
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A Razor Pages application

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Startup.cs

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 Handling errors using middleware
If an exception NullReferenceException
occurs in a middleware component, it
propagates up the pipeline.
 If the pipeline doesn’t handle the
exception, the web server will return a
500 status code back to the user.

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 Handling errors using middleware
Error handling middleware attempts to address these
problems by modifying the response before the app returns it to
the user.
returns details of the error that occurred
returns a generic, but friendly, HTML page to the user.
Place error handling middleware early in the middleware
pipeline to ensure it will catch any errors generated in
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Handling errors using middleware

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 Viewing exceptions in development:
DeveloperExceptionPage
• Microsoft provides
DeveloperExceptionPage
Middleware, which can be
added to your middleware
pipeline using
app.UseDeveloperExcepti
onPage();

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Handling exceptions in production:
ExceptionHandlerMiddleware

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Handling exceptions

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 Customizing Error Page
• When adding ExceptionHandlerMiddleware to your application, you’ll typically
provide a path to the custom error page that will be displayed to the user.
app.UseExceptionHandler("/Error");
• ExceptionHandlerMiddleware will invoke this path after it captures an
exception, in order to generate the final response.
• The ability to dynamically generate a response is a key feature of
ExceptionHandlerMiddleware—it allows you to re-execute a middleware pipeline
in order to generate the response sent to the user.

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StatusCodePagesMiddleware
o Microsoft provides
StatusCodePagesMiddleware for
handling this use case.
o As with all error handling middleware,
you should add it early in your
middleware pipeline, as it will only handle
errors generated by later middleware
components.

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StatusCodePagesMiddleware

app.UseStatusCodePages();

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 StatusCodePagesMiddleware
• to re-execute the pipeline when an error is captured, replace the call to
UseStatusCodePages with the following extension method
app.UseStatusCodePagesWithReExecute("/{0}");
• Note that the error handling path "/{0}" contains a format string token,
{0}. When the path is re-executed, the middleware will replace this token
with the status code number. For example, a 404 error would re-execute
the /404 path.

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 Summary
• Middleware has a similar role to HTTP modules and handlers in ASP.NET
but is more easily reasoned about.
• Middleware is composed in a pipeline, with the output of one middleware
passing to the input of the next.
• The middleware pipeline is two-way: requests pass through each
middleware on the way in and responses pass back through in the reverse
order on the way out.

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 Summary
• Middleware can short-circuit the pipeline by handling a request and returning a response, or it can
pass the request on to the next middleware in the pipeline.
• Middleware can modify a request by adding data to, or changing, the HttpContext object.
• If an earlier middleware short-circuits the pipeline, not all middleware will execute for all requests.
• If a request isn’t handled, the middleware pipeline will return a 404 status code.
• The order in which middleware is added to IApplicationBuilder defines the order in which
middleware will execute in the pipeline.

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 Summary
• The middleware pipeline can be re-executed, as long as a response’s
headers haven’t been sent.
• When added to a middleware pipeline, StaticFileMiddleware will serve
any requested files found in the wwwroot folder of your application.
• DeveloperExceptionPageMiddleware provides a lot of information about
errors when developing an application but should never be used in
production.

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 Summary
• ExceptionHandlerMiddleware lets you provide user-friendly custom error
handling messages when an exception occurs in the pipeline.
• StatusCodePagesMiddleware lets you provide user-friendly custom error
handling messages when the pipeline returns a raw error response status
code.
• Microsoft provides some common middleware and there are many third-
party options available on NuGet and GitHub.

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