Passing Parameters To Middleware In ASP.NET Core 2.0

Problem

How do you pass parameters to middleware during its setup in ASP.NET Core?

Solution

In an empty project add a POCO class to hold parameters for the middleware,

Add a middleware,

Solution A - Instance Type

Add extension method to configure the middleware,

Configure the middleware,

Solution B - Function Type

Add extension method to configure the middleware,

Configure the middleware,

Discussion

I discussed in an earlier post that it is good practice to define middleware in a separate class and add to the pipeline using extension methods. We may also need to pass information to our middleware classes though and I’ve come across two patterns for this when digging into ASP.NET Core source code and other samples online.

These are really straightforward as demonstrated in solution A and B above. We wrap our parameters in a POCO class and create an extension method that takes in either,

  1. POCO instance
  2. Function to call, which in turn sets up the POCO.

Note
That the POCO is passed on to the middleware in its constructor. UseMiddleware() method takes in params object[] for arguments to be passed onto middleware constructor.

Configuring Services

These patterns could also be used for setting up dependency injection the service container. To demonstrate add a service,

Add either of these extension methods to configure services,

Configure services with either of these,

Source Code

GitHub