Netty ChannelHandlerContext not unique?

Question

I have been using Netty for a while but mainly for using normal sockets when their channels always unique, thus I can map channels to know who are connecting to my server.

Now I have managed to implement http communication. The problem is that values of ChannelHandlerContext handlers (and either channels from those handlers) are not unique, I cannot detect who are connecting just by their handlers.

Questions:

Is that behaviour (ChannelHandlerContext handler values not unique) normal or do I have some bugs in code?
Any idea, solution?

Many thanks

My ChannelInitializer looks like the following:

public class NettyHttpServerInitializer extends ChannelInitializer<SocketChannel> {
    @Override
    public void initChannel(SocketChannel ch) throws Exception {
        ChannelPipeline pipeline = ch.pipeline();
        pipeline.addLast("http", new HttpServerCodec()));
        pipeline.addLast("dechunker", new HttpObjectAggregator(65536)); 
        pipeline.addLast("handler", new HttpServerHandler());
   }
}

My server handler looks like (values of ctx and ctx.channel() are not unique even trigged from same client):

public class HttpServerHandler extends SimpleChannelInboundHandler<FullHttpRequest> {
    @Override
    protected void messageReceived(ChannelHandlerContext ctx, FullHttpRequest msg) throws Exception {
        ...
    }
}

Ferrybig Ferrybig · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-31T13:46:29

When making a http protocol, a connection can be reused, that means that 1 connection can handle multiple requests. You should not the priciple of a connection is a person for your game, but you should use cookies or some sort of access token in your protocol.

Under normal circumstances, browsers will keep a maximum of 2 connections to the same ip.

Netty ChannelHandlerContext not unique?

1 Answers