Add ConnectionContext.Items to ConnectionInfo

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I added middleware to ConnectionBuilder in order to detect request source. Later I expected to find my data at HttpContext.Items. But I found that ConnectionContext.Items and HttpContext.Items are different objects.

webHostBuilder.ConfigureKestrel((context, options) =>
    {
        options.Listen(IPAddress.Parse("0.0.0.0"), 3301, listenOptions =>
        {
            listenOptions.Use((connectionContext, next) =>
              {
                  connectionContext.Items.Add("kestrelEndpoint", "3301");
                  return next();
              });
        });
      File.Delete("/tmp/api.socket");
      options.ListenUnixSocket("/tmp/api.socket", listenOptions =>
      {
           listenOptions.Use((connectionContext, next) =>
           {
               connectionContext.Items.Add("kestrelEndpoint", "unixSocket");
               return next();
           });
      });
 });

Describe the solution you’d like

Add ConnectionContext.Items to ConnectionInfo along with ConnectionId and some other fields. So, ConnectionContext.Items will be accessible over HttpContext.Connection in middlewares and controllers. And it will be possible to pass any needed data from connection processing pipeline to request pipeline.

[halter73]

Neither Kestrel nor HttpSys will be affected by passing already existed data from connection context (which is not Kestrel or HttpSys specific) to http context.

ConnectionContext is a Kestrel-specific API today. Other servers could theoretically implement the abstraction, but I’m not aware of any others that do today. As @Tratcher points out, the HTTP.Sys doesn’t give you direct control over the underlying connection making implementing the abstraction in HttpSysServer impossible.

Even in Kestrel’s case, I don’t we should combine ConnectionContext.Items and HttpContext.Items because it’s a pretty niche use case and it would technically breaking. There is a pretty easy workaround though:

To access ConnectionContext.Items and ConnectionContext.Id from request middleware, you can do something like the following:

IDictionary<object, object> connectionItems = httpContext.Features.Get<IConnectionItemsFeature>().Items;
string connectionId = httpContext.Connection.Id;

Does this work for you @coderuid?

[davidfowl]

It’s not available in the enumeration currently but maybe it should be.