LifeOfARequest.wiki

#summary One-sentence summary of this page.
#labels 2013DeveloperDoc

= Introduction =

This section describes how each request which comes to the application is handled step by step. It is important to be aware of all the phases.


= Details =

So let us try to investigate what happens with each incoming HTTP request. Let us split its lifetime into the following stages:
  * AppEngine
  * Django
  * middleware modules
  * request handler matching
    * 

* Django 

At this point the request is processed by Django. It is responsibility is to handle the incoming request object and return an appropriate response. The class, which is responsible for handling the request, is called [https://code.google.com/p/soc/source/browse/thirdparty/google_appengine/lib/django-1.2/django/core/handlers/base.py django.core.handlers.core.WSGIHandler]. The first step, which was actually triggered by AppEngine in order to conform with WSGI pattern, is to invoke the object's __call__ method. We will not go into details of what exactly happens then and how. Suffice it to say that WSGIRequest object is created and passed to get_response method. 

One of the first steps performed by get_response method is to apply the registered middleware classes. Those classes are responsible taking certain actions before the request can be dispatched. The middleware classes specified for Melange project are listed in settings.py module under MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES constant.

At the time of this writing three classes are registered for the project.
 * AppStatsDjangoMiddleware

The main purpose is to record AppEngine statistics. It is provided by AppEngine specifically to be installed as one of Django middlewere classes. They recommend it should be listed at the first position, as other middleware classes may make RPC calls.

 * BlobStoreMiddleware

The purpose of this class is to handle POST requests containing file uploads. The way AppEngine works is that they first have to be uploaded to Blobstore.

 * XsrfMiddleware

It checks the presence of XSRF token for POST requests.

Writing your own middleware class, one has to conform to the interface which is specified by Django and can be found [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/middleware/ here]. In particular, in order for a task to be processed in a request middleware class, i.e. before the request is actually dispatched to one of application specific handlers, process_request has to be implemented. 

* Request handler

The next step which is performed by Django in get_response function is to resolve the user specified URL and find a callback object. Here is where Melange part of the processing really begins. Below it will be described what callback object is and how it produces response.

There is base RequestHandler class which outlines behavior and determines workflow. The first method which is invoked is __call__ method, as get_response function treats these objects as callbacks. To summarize the methods does the following:

    1. Initialize request, arguments and keyword arguments as instance variables
    2. It is checked if the application is currently in maintenance mode, if so MaintainceMode exception is raised and users are asked to try again later.
    3. Access check is called so as to determine if the current user is allowed to submit the request
    3. Delegates how the request is supposed to be handled in _dispatch
    4. Handles several known exception types that may have been raised.
    5. Returns the response.