Chapter 6. Manipulating Interceptor Chains on the Fly

Interceptor chains only live as long as the message exchange that sparked their creation. Each message contains a reference to the interceptor chain responsible for processing it. Developers can use this reference to alter the message's interceptor chain. Because the chain is per-exchange, any changes made to a message's interceptor chain will not effect other message exchanges.

Interceptor chains and the interceptors in the chain are instantiated on a per-invocation basis. When an endpoint is invoked to participate in a message exchange, the required interceptor chains are instantiated along with instances of its interceptors. When the message exchange that caused the creation of the interceptor chain is completed, the chain and its interceptor instances are destroyed.

This means that any changes you make to the interceptor chain or to the fields of an interceptor do not persist across message exchanges. So, if an interceptor places another interceptor in the active chain only the active chain is effected. Any future message exchanges will be created from a pristine state as determined by the endpoint's configuration. It also means that a developer cannot set flags in an interceptor that will alter future message processing.

The first step in changing a message's interceptor chain is getting the interceptor chain. This is done using the Message.getInterceptorChain() method shown in Example 6.1, “Method for getting an interceptor chain”. The interceptor chain is returned as a org.apache.cxf.interceptor.InterceptorChain object.

The InterceptorChain object has two methods, shown in Example 6.2, “Methods for adding interceptors to an interceptor chain”, for adding interceptors to an interceptor chain. One allows you to add a single interceptor and the other allows you to add multiple interceptors.

Example 6.3, “Adding an interceptor to an interceptor chain on-the-fly” shows code for adding a single interceptor to a message's interceptor chain.

void handleMessage(Message message)
{
  ...
  AddledIntereptor addled = new AddledIntereptor(); 1
  InterceptorChain chain = message.getInterceptorChain(); 2
  chain.add(addled); 3
  ...
}

The code in Example 6.3, “Adding an interceptor to an interceptor chain on-the-fly” does the following:

The InterceptorChain object has one method, shown in Example 6.4, “Methods for removing interceptors from an interceptor chain”, for removing an interceptor from an interceptor chain.

Example 6.5, “Removing an interceptor from an interceptor chain on-the-fly” shows code for removing an interceptor from a message's interceptor chain.

void handleMessage(Message message)
{
  ...
  SackedIntereptor sacked = new SackedIntereptor(); 1
  InterceptorChain chain = message.getInterceptorChain(); 2
  chain.remove(sacked); 3
  ...
}

The code in Example 6.5, “Removing an interceptor from an interceptor chain on-the-fly” does the following: