Hei, Just curious why content is marked as internal ? When used together with ResponseObserver, Then...

# ktor

[Satyam Agarwal]

Hei,
Just curious why content is marked as internal ?
When used together with ResponseObserver, Then I have to use OptIn internal api annotation.
I use ResponseObserver to log response body. I donot want to use bodyAsChannel, as it may contain modified response.
https://github.com/ktorio/ktor/blob/main/ktor-client/ktor-client-core/common/src/io/ktor/client/statement/HttpResponse.kt#L55-L56

[Aleksei Tirman [JB]]

@Rustam Siniukov

[Rustam Siniukov]

Because content is raw response and we want to discourage its usage. If you know what you do, just use @OptIn , should be safe.

[Satyam Agarwal]

Are there plans to expose it in some other way then, I mean raw response in combination with ResponseObserver is especially helpful

[Rustam Siniukov]

If we get more use cases to come up with a good API for it, then yes.

[Satyam Agarwal]

Okay.
With the risk of being a little pushy, doesn’t the motivation of ResponseObserver class remains incomplete if one cannot observer complete response (meaning, reading the response body, and perhaps using it in the handler) ?

[Satyam Agarwal]

Could ResponseObserver then provide, httpResponse, and content as predicates to the handler, so we can use it in our cases ?

[Satyam Agarwal]

just like ResponseBodyReadyForSend Hook ? (a server hook I know, but pointing it out as a feature)

[Rustam Siniukov]

No worries, explaining your use cases is always welcome!
In this case we will make it really easy to access raw body, which is usually discouraged. Imagine you have gzip encoding in your response. There is not much sense in accessing it as it is. But if callback will receive it as a parameter, users will almost for certain try to read it instead of calling .bodyAsChannel()
Maybe we need to create an annotation similar to @DangerousApi in coroutines, and use it here instead of @InternalApi .

[Rustam Siniukov]

ResponseBodyReadyForSend receives processed body with all the transformations applied, .content is just bytes that we read from the network

[Satyam Agarwal]

Yeah, that makes sense, just a naive question. Apart from byteBuffer to concrete type transformtion when .bodyAsChannel is called, are there other transformations one can expect in HttpResponsePipeline ?

[Rustam Siniukov]

Mostly transforming and content encoding

[Satyam Agarwal]

Thank you 🙂