Calls
note
This help topic is in development and will be updated in the future.
When handling routes, or directly intercepting the pipeline, you get a context with an ApplicationCall.
The ApplicationCall
provides access to two main properties ApplicationRequest
and ApplicationResponse
. As their names indicate, they correspond to the incoming request and outgoing response. In addition to these, it also provides an ApplicationEnvironment
, and some useful functions to help respond to client requests. Given that pipelines can be executed asynchronously, ApplicationCall
also represents the logical execution context with Attributes
to pass data between various parts of the pipeline.
Installing an interceptor into the pipeline is the primary method to alter the processing of an ApplicationCall
. Nearly all Ktor features are interceptors that perform various operations in different phases of the application call processing.
intercept(ApplicationCallPipeline.Call) {
if (call.request.uri == "/")
call.respondText("Test String")
}
The code above installs an interceptor into the Call
phase of an ApplicationCall
processing and responds with plain text when the request is asking for a root page.
This is just an example, and usually, page requests are not handled in this way, as there is a routing facility that does this and more. Also, as mentioned previously, defining interceptor is usually done using features with an install
function.
Most functions available on ApplicationCall
(such as respondText
above) are suspend
functions, indicating that they can potentially execute asynchronously.
See advanced topic Pipelines for more information on the mechanics of processing ApplicationCall
s.