Directive Intent

Within an Unfiltered plan, an intent function maps from request objects to response functions. With directives, you define a partial function mapping from requests to a Result. We compose this function with another, which produces the standard intent function understood by Unfiltered.

Selective enforcement

You can define a directive function using familiar request extractors. Let’s start with a raw intent function.

copysourceimport unfiltered.request._
import unfiltered.response._
import unfiltered.jetty.SocketPortBinding

val binding = SocketPortBinding(host = "localhost", port = 8080)

val Simple = unfiltered.filter.Planify {
  case Path("/") & Accepts.Json(_) =>
    JsonContent ~> ResponseString("""{ "response": "Ok" }""")
}
unfiltered.jetty.Server.portBinding(binding).plan(Simple).run()

You can use curl to inspect the different responses:

curl -v http://localhost:8080/ -H "Accept: application/json"
curl -v http://localhost:8080/

The 404 response page to the second request is not so great. With directives, we’ll do better than that by default.

copysourceimport unfiltered.directives._, Directives._

val Smart = unfiltered.filter.Planify { Directive.Intent {
  case Path("/") =>
    for {
      _ <- Accepts.Json
    } yield JsonContent ~> ResponseString("""{ "response": "Ok" }""")
} }
unfiltered.jetty.Server.portBinding(binding).plan(Smart).run()

And with that you’ll see a 406 Not Acceptable response when appropriate.

Directives results are typically, but not necessarily, defined in a single for expression. In the expression above we discard the result value of the Accepts.Json directive, as we did previously with the extractor, and map it to our dummy response function.

The 406 error response is produced by the directive itself, encapsulating behavior that can be used everywhere. What if you want different error behavior? Make your own directive! (Seriously, you’ll see how on the next page.)

One true path

You may have noticed that directives transfer (and enrich) routing logic from extractors. If your extractors are reduced to the task of matching against paths alone, you can even eliminate those.

copysourceval Sweet = unfiltered.filter.Planify { Directive.Intent.Path {
  case "/" =>
    for {
      _ <- Accepts.Json
    } yield JsonContent ~> ResponseString("""{ "response": "Ok" }""")
} }
unfiltered.jetty.Server.portBinding(binding).plan(Sweet).run()

It looks pretty different, but remember that here still composes to a standard Unfiltered intent function.