Boost C++ Libraries

The Expect field with the value "100-continue" in a request is special. It indicates that the after sending the message header, a client desires an immediate informational response before sending the the message body, which presumably may be expensive to compute or large. This behavior is described in rfc7231 section 5.1.1. Handling the Expect field can be implemented easily in a server by constructing a parser to read the header first, then send an informational HTTP response, and finally read the body using the same parser instance. A synchronous version of this server action looks like this:

/** Receive a request, handling Expect: 100-continue if present.

    This function will read a request from the specified stream.
    If the request contains the Expect: 100-continue field, a
    status response will be delivered.

    @param stream The remote HTTP client stream.

    @param buffer The buffer used for reading.

    @param ec Set to the error, if any occurred.
*/
template<
    class SyncStream,
    class DynamicBuffer>
void
receive_expect_100_continue(
    SyncStream& stream,
    DynamicBuffer& buffer,
    error_code& ec)
{
    static_assert(is_sync_stream<SyncStream>::value,
        "SyncStream requirements not met");

    static_assert(
        boost::asio::is_dynamic_buffer<DynamicBuffer>::value,
        "DynamicBuffer requirements not met");

    // Declare a parser for a request with a string body
    request_parser<string_body> parser;

    // Read the header
    read_header(stream, buffer, parser, ec);
    if(ec)
        return;

    // Check for the Expect field value
    if(parser.get()[field::expect] == "100-continue")
    {
        // send 100 response
        response<empty_body> res;
        res.version(11);
        res.result(status::continue_);
        res.set(field::server, "test");
        write(stream, res, ec);
        if(ec)
            return;
    }

    // Read the rest of the message.
    //
    // We use parser.base() to return a basic_parser&, to avoid an
    // ambiguous function error (from boost::asio::read). Another
    // solution is to qualify the call, e.g. `beast::http::read`
    //
    read(stream, buffer, parser.base(), ec);
}