Quick and Dirty AoP in Nancy with Castle Windsor

I’m really enjoying using Nancy to build my RESTful web API, however being as new as it is means that it is missing some of the kinds of features you might have in more mature web frameworks (though at the rate it’s being developed this won’t be true for very long).  One of these missing features is a way to do some aspect oriented programming around the request/response pipeline.

As of right now Nancy basically lets you map a request URL to a method which can format the response back. There is a concept of a “filter” but it isn’t like the before/after filters of Rails, it’s just a boolean route matching filter (if false then the route doesn’t match). What we really need is a way to insert our aspects (logging, authentication, error handling) in the request and response pipeline both before and after the handler method.  This is a common feature of other web frameworks like OpenRasta, Rails and also Sinatra, from where Nancy draws it’s inspiration. 

A discussion is currently going on about how to implement this for Nancy and something has been promised soon, but what do we do in the meantime?  Well we use our IoC container and it’s dynamic proxy support of course.

Pretty much every container out there (except Unity I think, no suprise there) supports some kind of interception as a way of getting some quick and dirty AoP however I’m not going to cover all of them, just Windsor since I’m more familiar with it, nonetheless you should be able to follow the same basic approach with any other container supported by Nancy (again, except Unity).

First, you will want to check out my forked “development” branch of Nancy (at least until I submit a new pull request).  I had to make some adjustments to the WindsorBootstrapper due to Windsor not having the same type of child container behaviour as other IoC containers (this appears to be by design). I’m glad Krysztof has involved himself in the discussion and I’m confident we will work out these issues very soon).  Bottom line, my Windsor bootstrapper implementation is 100% stable (and memory leak free) but it only supports running under ASP.NET, it will not work under anything else.  Also it doesn’t support the Nancy per-web-request registration, instead register those components using Windsor’s own PerWebRequestLifeCycle and add the module to your web.config.

I like to have things wired up by convention (over configuration) so I’ve create a facility to register my interceptors to my NancyModule classes.

The IAuthenticated interface decorates any NancyModule implementation where I want to use the interceptor to do authentication.  To use an interceptor we need to have a public or protected virtual method to intercept (this is required by the dynamic proxy) so here is how I would write my module handler.

We the authentication happens right before the call to the virtual method.  The RequiresAuthentication attribute tells us which methods require authentication, we can also have attribute parameters to restrict access to specific roles if we need.  Finally, here is the interceptor itself.

Obviously we are just faking authentication here, but you get the idea. 

You can inject aspects both before and after the request here.  I’m using interceptors to handle authentication, generic logging and error logging (using log4net) and also for handling exceptions by converting them into an appropriate response object that the API client can use.

I hope this is useful for people getting started with Nancy.  I fell that AoP is an important part of designing a good HTTP API that is easy to work with.  Though, as straight forward as this is to do using the container I am very much looking forward to seeing this as a first class concept in Nancy as it will avoid some of the need for virtual methods and attributes, which I don’t particularly like (nothing sucks like creating a new handler method and forgetting to make it virtual).