Remove a default pipeline contributor - openrasta

Question

What is the preferred way to remove a default pipeline contributor (OpenRasta 2.0.3)?
I haven't found a lot on that on the net, but one way seems to be writing a custom DependencyRegistrar, i.e. deriving from DefaultDependencyRegistrar and then e.g. overriding AddDefaultContributors(). Apart from that I doubt that it's the best way to remove just a single pipeline contributor, it seems to need additional per-host (ASP vs. InMemory) work, whereas I would consider messing with pipeline handlers to be a host-agnostic affair.
But even if I'd go this route, this guy here seems to have tried it without success: http://groups.google.com/group/openrasta/browse_thread/thread/d72b91e5994f402b
I tried similar things, but so far couldn't make my custom registrar replace the default.
So what's the simplest and best way to remove a default pipeline contributor, preferable in a host agnostic way? Is there a working example somewhere?

Answer 1

No, you just need to derive from the registrar and use the protected members that are available to imperatively remove the types you don't want auto-registered.
The registrar needs to be registered in your container before you provide it to OpenRasta, otherwise the type has been resolved already.

Answer 2

Answering myself with working code snippets as they might be helpful to others.
So it looks like removing default pipeline contributors cannot be done
in a host agnostic way (although I don't see why OpenRasta could not
be modified to allow for easy deletion of handlers in the future).
The 2 classes that need to be written are in fact independent of the
host(s) used:
public class MyDependencyRegistrar : DefaultDependencyRegistrar
{
protected override void AddDefaultContributors()
{
base.AddDefaultContributors();
PipelineContributorTypes.Remove(typeof(HandlerResolverContributor));
// If we remove the only contributor for the 'well-known'
// IHandlerSelection stage, like done above, we need to add
// another one implements IHandlerSelection, otherwise
// we'll run into errors (and what's the point of a pipeline
// without a handler selector anyway?). So let's do that here:
AddPipelineContributor<MyOwnHandlerResolverContributor>();
}
}
In order to make that Registrar available, we need to create an accessor
like the following, which then needs to be set in the various hosts:
public class MyDependencyResolverAccessor : IDependencyResolverAccessor
{
InternalDependencyResolver resolver;
public IDependencyResolver Resolver
{
get
{
if (resolver == null)
{
resolver = new InternalDependencyResolver();
resolver.AddDependency<IDependencyRegistrar, MyDependencyRegistrar>();
}
return resolver;
}
}
}
For Asp.Net, this seems to work for me:
public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication
{
void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
OpenRastaModule.Host.DependencyResolverAccessor =
new MyDependencyResolverAccessor();
For InMemoryHost, which I use for integration testing and in-process access
of my handlers, I haven't found a way around copying the whole class
InMemoryHost and modifying it to my needs. In fact, we don't need
MyDependencyResolverAccessor in this case, as InMemoryHost implements
IDependencyResolverAccessor already. So here's how it could look like. Only the
last line was actually added to the existing code in InMemoryHost:
public class TwinMemoryHost : IHost, IDependencyResolverAccessor, IDisposable
{
readonly IConfigurationSource _configuration;
bool _isDisposed;
public TwinMemoryHost(IConfigurationSource configuration)
{
_configuration = configuration;
Resolver = new InternalDependencyResolver();
Resolver.AddDependency<IDependencyRegistrar, MyDependencyRegistrar>();
...