Mongrel users - Jul 2007 - Patch: Allow overriding of handler dispatch in Mongrel::HttpServer

Hi Zed (and list),

I first of all wanted to thank you for all the hard work you''ve done  
to make writing
HTTP services in Ruby easier and more reliable. A friend of mine and  
I are developing
a network filestore service (similar to S3) based on Mongrel, and we  
got a fairly
useful set of functionality done and working in a matter of a few  
weeks thanks
largely to your work. Mongrel has been reliable, easy to use, and has  
freed us from
having to do any of the nasty bits of HTTP. Thanks!

We''re adding a content-negotiation and filtering layer to the service  
now, and have
run into a bit of a snag in the way  
Mongrel::HttpServer#process_client does its
dispatching to the handlers registered for a given path: namely that  
we want to be
able to wrap up Mongrel''s request and response objects in our own  
objects and send
those to each handler''s #process method.

We could of course override #process_client in our own subclass of
Mongrel::HttpServer, but that''s a fairly large chunk of functionality  
to duplicate,
so I was wondering if we could ask that the actual dispatch to the  
handlers be moved
out into a method that can be specifically overridden. A proposed patch:

Index: lib/mongrel.rb
==================================================================---
lib/mongrel.rb      (revision 540)
+++ lib/mongrel.rb      (working copy)
@@ -613,11 +613,7 @@
                # request is good so far, continue processing the  
response
                response = HttpResponse.new(client)
-              # Process each handler in registered order until we  
run out or one finalizes the response.
-              handlers.each do |handler|
-                handler.process(request, response)
-                break if response.done or client.closed?
-              end
+              dispatch_to_handlers(client, handlers, request, response)
                # And finally, if nobody closed the response off, we  
finalize it.
                unless response.done or client.closed?
@@ -658,6 +654,17 @@
        end
      end
+
+    # Process each handler in registered order until we run out or  
one finalizes the
+    # response.
+    def dispatch_to_handlers(client, handlers, request, response)
+        handlers.each do |handler|
+          handler.process(request, response)
+          return if response.done or client.closed?
+        end
+    end
+
+
      # Used internally to kill off any worker threads that have  
taken too long
      # to complete processing.  Only called if there are too many  
processors
      # currently servicing.  It returns the count of workers still  
active

All the unit tests continue to pass with this change, and I couldn''t  
think of
anything else within the purvue of Mongrel::HttpServer that needed  
additional
testing, but if you''d like me to try to come up with tests for this  
change I can do
that.

We''re currently re-opening Mongrel::HttpServer and applying this  
patch ourselves,
which of course works just fine, but I thought that perhaps someone  
else might want
to do something similar and could benefit from this. It would also  
make our keeping
up with future changes to Mongrel easier with (I hope) a minimum of  
code-fistage.

Thanks for your time,

--
Michael Granger <ged at FaerieMUD.org>
Rubymage, Believer, Architect
The FaerieMUD Consortium <http://www.FaerieMUD.org/>
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