What you don’t want to do is block the underlying Netty event loop within your filter, instead you want the filter to proceed with execution once any I/O is complete.

As an example, consider the following example that uses RxJava to compose an I/O operation:

A TraceService Example using RxJava

A TraceService Example using RxJava

import io.micronaut.http.HttpRequest
import io.reactivex.Flowable
import io.reactivex.schedulers.Schedulers
import org.slf4j.Logger
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory
import javax.inject.Singleton
@Singleton
class TraceService {
    private static final Logger LOG = LoggerFactory.getLogger(TraceService.class)
    Flowable<Boolean> trace(HttpRequest<?> request) {
        Flowable.fromCallable({ ->  (1)
            if (LOG.isDebugEnabled()) {
                LOG.debug("Tracing request: " + request.getUri())
            }
            // trace logic here, potentially performing I/O (2)
            return true
        }).subscribeOn(Schedulers.io()) (3)
    }
}

import io.micronaut.http.HttpRequest
import io.reactivex.Flowable
import io.reactivex.schedulers.Schedulers
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory
import javax.inject.Singleton
@Singleton
    private val LOG = LoggerFactory.getLogger(TraceService::class.java)
    internal fun trace(request: HttpRequest<*>): Flowable<Boolean> {
        return Flowable.fromCallable {
            (1)
            if (LOG.isDebugEnabled) {
                LOG.debug("Tracing request: " + request.uri)
            }
            // trace logic here, potentially performing I/O (2)
            true
        }.subscribeOn(Schedulers.io()) (3)
    }
}

You can then inject this implementation into your filter definition:

An Example HttpServerFilter

An Example HttpServerFilter

import io.micronaut.http.HttpRequest
import io.micronaut.http.MutableHttpResponse
import io.micronaut.http.annotation.Filter
import io.micronaut.http.filter.HttpServerFilter
import io.micronaut.http.filter.ServerFilterChain
import org.reactivestreams.Publisher
@Filter("/hello/**") (1)
class TraceFilter implements HttpServerFilter { (2)
    private final TraceService traceService
    TraceFilter(TraceService traceService) { (3)
        this.traceService = traceService
    }
}

An Example HttpServerFilter

import io.micronaut.http.HttpRequest
import io.micronaut.http.MutableHttpResponse
import io.micronaut.http.filter.HttpServerFilter
import io.micronaut.http.filter.ServerFilterChain
import org.reactivestreams.Publisher
@Filter("/hello/**") (1)
class TraceFilter((2)
        private val traceService: TraceService)(3)
    : HttpServerFilter {
}

The doFilter implementation

The doFilter implementation

    @Override
    Publisher<MutableHttpResponse<?>> doFilter(HttpRequest<?> request, ServerFilterChain chain) {
        traceService.trace(request) (1)
                           .switchMap({ aBoolean -> chain.proceed(request) }) (2)
                           .doOnNext({ res -> (3)
                               res.getHeaders().add("X-Trace-Enabled", "true")
                           })
    }

The doFilter implementation

    override fun doFilter(request: HttpRequest<*>, chain: ServerFilterChain): Publisher<MutableHttpResponse<*>> {
        return traceService.trace(request) (1)
                .switchMap { aBoolean -> chain.proceed(request) } (2)
                .doOnNext { res ->
                    (3)
                    res.headers.add("X-Trace-Enabled", "true")
                }

The previous example demonstrates some key concepts such as executing logic in a non-blocking matter before proceeding with the request and modifying the outgoing response.