Interceptors

Interceptors are a powerful way to observe and mutate outbound and inbound headers, data, trailers, and errors both for unary APIs and streams.

An interceptor is instantiated once for each request and provides a set of closures that are invoked by the client during the lifecycle of that request. Each closure provides the ability for the interceptor to observe and store state, as well as the option to mutate the outbound or inbound content.

For example, here is an interceptor that adds an Authorization header to all outbound requests that are destined for the demo.connectrpc.com host:

import Connect

/// Interceptor that adds an `Authorization` header to outbound
/// requests to `demo.connectrpc.com`.
final class ExampleAuthInterceptor: Interceptor {
    init(config: ProtocolClientConfig) {}

    func unaryFunction() -> UnaryFunction {
        return UnaryFunction(
            requestFunction: { request in
                if request.url.host != "demo.connectrpc.com" {
                    return request
                }

                var headers = request.headers
                headers["Authorization"] = ["SOME_USER_TOKEN"]
                return HTTPRequest(
                    url: request.url,
                    contentType: request.contentType,
                    headers: headers,
                    message: request.message
                )
            },
            responseFunction: { $0 }, // Return the response as-is
            responseMetricsFunction: { $0 } // Can be used to observe metrics
        )
    }

    func streamFunction() -> StreamFunction {
        return StreamFunction(...)
    }
}

Interceptors are registered with the ProtocolClient on initialization:

let client = ProtocolClient(
    httpClient: URLSessionHTTPClient(),
    config: ProtocolClientConfig(
        host: "https://demo.connectrpc.com",
        networkProtocol: .connect,
        codec: ProtoCodec(),
        interceptors: [{ ExampleAuthInterceptor(config: $0) }]
    )
)

The client will then invoke each interceptor in FIFO order on the request path, and in LIFO order on the response path.

For example, if the following interceptors are registered:

interceptors: [
    { A(config: $0) },
    { B(config: $0) },
    { C(config: $0) },
    { D(config: $0) },
]

They'll be created each time a request is initiated by the client, then invoked in the following order:

Client -> A -> B -> C -> D -> Server
Client <- D <- C <- B <- A <- Server