When handling routes, or directly intercepting the pipeline, you get a context with an ApplicationCall.
The ApplicationCall provides access to two main properties ApplicationRequest and ApplicationResponse.
As their names indicate, they correspond to the incoming request and outgoing response. In addition to these,
it also provides an ApplicationEnvironment, and some useful functions to help respond to client requests.
Given that pipelines can be executed asynchronously, ApplicationCall also represents the logical execution
context with Attributes to pass data between various parts of the pipeline.
Installing an interceptor into the pipeline is the primary method to alter the processing of an ApplicationCall.
Nearly all Ktor features are interceptors that perform various operations in different phases of
the application call processing.
intercept(ApplicationCallPipeline.Call) {
if (call.request.uri == "/")
call.respondText("Test String")
}
The code above installs an interceptor into the Call phase of an ApplicationCall processing and responds with plain text
when the request is asking for a root page.
This is just an example, and usually, page requests are not handled in this way, as there is a routing facility that does this
and more. Also, as mentioned previously, defining interceptor is usually done using features with an install function.
Most functions available on ApplicationCall (such as respondText above) are suspend functions, indicating that they
can potentially execute asynchronously.
See advanced topic Pipeline for more information on the mechanics of processing ApplicationCalls.