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I'm working on a self-hosted ASP.NET web api-application. Everything works fine, but now I'm struggling with HttpContext:

I need to save session-informations from the client. But HttpContext.Current is always null. So it's obvious that my HttpSelfHostServer don't work with the static HttpContext-Class.

The thing I don't understand is: why..? And I can't figure out a way to tell neither HtttpSelfHostServer nor HttpSelfHostConfiguration to work with HttpContext.

Here's what I'm doing:

  1. Creating a HttpSelfHostConfiguration

    • 1.1 Adding Service-Resolvers & Routes
    • 1.2 Adding custom UserNamePassword-Validator

  2. create new Instance of HttpSelfHostServer with the config

    • 2.1 server.OpenAsync().Wait()

Any help how I can tell my server to work with HttpContext.Current is greatly appreciated! Cheers!

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  • Maybe need AspNetCompatibility: stackoverflow.com/questions/5904313/… Commented Jul 5, 2012 at 15:43
  • hi mellamokb. Thanks, but if I use the aspNetCompatibelity-Mode, I'm still going to neeed a IIS, which is the thing I want to avoid. Commented Jul 6, 2012 at 9:42
  • Also note the second answer in the link I posted refers to a lot of the same information being available in OperationContext. What exactly do you need out of the HttpContext? Commented Jul 6, 2012 at 13:18
  • OperationContext only exists in the WCF world, not in ASP.Net WebApi Commented Jul 15, 2012 at 22:23

2 Answers 2

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You won't be able to use HttpContext in a self-hosted environment. HttpContext is set by the ASP.Net pipeline, which you won't have if you don't run under IIS/ASP.Net.

The HttpContext is only available in the Web-Hosting mode, in which the HttpControllerHandler creates the request.

FYI- I invite you to read the following great articles from Pedro Felix to better understand the different hosting models:

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To get around this problem (I find I am using a lot of components these days that need to work equally well in Web API and MVC), you can try this old shim I wrote to give you back an HttpContext-like interface that works in both flavours. It's on NuGet also, here's the source: Link on github (or Link on Nuget)

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Thanks for taking the time to post this here and to Github; I had a legacy component that expects to float around in a static variable on the current thread, and this shim beats it into submission even under SelfHost. Works like a charm!
What you are offering seems very cool. However, I was unable to see whether it supports replacements of the HttpSession object - HttpContext.Current.Session seems unavailable. Does your library support session state? If not, could you recommend any way to get a session state replacement? Could I use HttpContext.Current.Items ?
this somehow removed my system.web.http 5.2.3.0 reference and replaced it with 4.0.0.0, got loads of build errors from it
@DaniëlTulp too late to be valuable but for the next person I'd just pull the code from github.com/danielcrenna/vault
@DanielCrenna which of those projects in particular Daniel?

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