Today I was asked “what is StrongWildcard and WeakWildcard, and which one should I use?”. The piece of object model that my co-worker is asking about is:
public enum
HostNameComparisonMode{
Exact = 1,
WeakWildcard = 2,
}
Most bindings have a HostNameComparisonMode property on them. This property is used for service-side endpoints (IChannelListener), in conjunction with the ListenUri of that endpoint. The values are semantics similar to + and * for http.sys registrations. “Wildcard” vs. “Exact” refers to how we match the authority (hostname+port) piece of an incoming Uri. For “Wildcard”, anything matches. For “Exact”, we perform a case-insensitive string comparison to determine equality.
“Strong” vs. “Weak” has to do with the relative priorities of endpoints. We use three longest-prefix-match tables, one each for StrongWildcard, Exact, and WeakWildcard. When a Message comes into the system, we first try to match the Uri against our Strong table (which uses a wildcard comparison on hostname+port). If nothing matches, we try the Exact table (using a case-insensitive exact comparison on hostname+port). Lastly, if there was no match on Strong or Exact, we check the Weak table (again using a wildcard match for hostname+port).
For example, let’s say you have the following endpoints registered on your machine:
- (http://foo.com/a/b/c/, StrongWildcard)
- (http://foo.com/a/b/, Exact)
- (http://bar.com/, Exact)
- (http://foo.com/a/, WeakWildcard)
A request coming in for http://foo.com/a/b/c/d/
will match (1).
A request for http://foo.com/a/b/
will match (2) since the strong comparison fails (/a/b/c/ is not a prefix of /a/b/).
A request for http://foo.com/a/d/
will match (4). Even though “/” is a prefix match of “/a/d/” for (3), the hostnames differ and so the Exact match will fail.
Lastly, a request for http://bar.com/a/b/
will match (3). (2) is a prefix match but the hostnames differ, and (3) takes precedence over (4) in priority order.
Hopfully this helps demystify our endpoint URI matching process!
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