Castle Windsor ASP.Net HTTP Handler Factory

When writing a simple HTTP handler in .Net, the framework provides support for replacing the default HTTP Handler Factory with your own factory which provides support for dependency injection.

The framework exposes an interface called IHttpHandlerFactory which you will need to implement with the code for your custom factory.

The HTTP Handler Factory

Here’s one I prepared earlier that will return HTTP handlers based on the name the classed were registered with in Castle Windsor.

It makes the assumption that your HttpApplication class in Global.asax.cs exposes the container, via the IContainerAccessor interface.

Wiring it in

You will need to add an entry in your web.config file that tells the framework to use your factory to satisfy HTTP requests.

<configuration>
	<system.webServer>
		<handlers>
			<add
				verb="GET,POST"
				path="*.sample"
				name="HandlerFactory"
				type="CastleWindsorHttpHandlerFactory"/>
		</handlers>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

This will register the extension .sample to have it’s requests satisfied by the class that Castle Windsor believes is appropriate to handle that request based on the logic in your handler factory.

More details for how to do this can be found on the MSDN article on creating and registering HTTP handler factories