Explicit Request Contexts

Request contexts provide a means of sending data from client to server without having to represent this data as input parameters in the signature of an operation.

For example, consider the following definition:

SLICE

struct Address 
{
    // ...
}

interface Person 
{
    string setAddress(Address a);
    // ...
}

Assuming that the client has a proxy to a Person object, it could do something along the following lines:

CPP

PersonPrx person = ...;
Address a = ...;

Ice::Context ctx;
ctx["write policy"] = "immediate";

person.setAddress(a, ctx);

On the server side, we can extract the policy value set from the Current object to influence how the implementation of setAddress works. For example:

CPP

void
PersonImpl::setAddress(Address a, const Ice::Current& current)
{
    auto i = current.ctx.find("write policy");
    if (i != current.ctx.end() && i->second == "immediate")
    {
        // Update the address details and write through to the 
        // data base immediately...
    } 
    else 
    {
        // Write policy was not set (or had a bad value), use
        // some other database write strategy.
    }
}

For this example, the server examines the value of the context with the key "write policy" and, if that value is "immediate", writes the update sent by the client straight away; if the write policy is not set or contains a value that is not recognized, the server presumably applies a more lenient write policy (such as caching the update in memory and writing it later).