Is it possible to implement a redirector / reverse proxy using RequestInterceptor from WCF REST Starter kit

Question

I am attempting to implement a reverse proxy using the RequestInterceptor from WCF REST starter kit. I am able to set the basic header properties and configure the calls. I am getting stuck with the following aspects:

1. Returning an appropriate response - my webservice can return text+xml, image or json. I am not able to send the appropriate response type. The Message.CreateMessage overloads are all SOAP aligned i.e. they accept only Xml constructs, so I am not able to send either JSON or image streams. I need to convert them into XElements - I am definitely doing something wrong here.

2. I also want the reverse proxy to be functioning well in the presence of cookies, gzip/deflate and SSL.

Based on the above requirements, do you think it makes sense to do this using REST starter kit? The Requestinterceptor was fairly easy to plug into, however the rest of the code is driving me nuts.

Answer 1

There is a mapping between both JSON and arbitrary binary content to XML which is used in messages for WCF (see some examples at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carlosfigueira/archive/2011/04/19/wcf-extensibility-message-inspectors.aspx), so you can use Message.CreateMessage to create non-XML messages as well.

Having said that, it's really not intuitive to do that in WCF as of now. The new libraries in the WCF Web API - http://wcf.codeplex.com - provide a very nice way of intercepting / redirecting / bypassing the WCF pipeline especifically for HTTP messages. Also, it support multiple formats in a native way (i.e., without need to do some mapping to XML).