C#® Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET

Dynamic Handler Assignment

In some cases, you may want to dynamically determine at runtime the appropriate HttpHandler to call for handling a particular request. .NET provides a Factory design pattern that allows you to create a Factory that is responsible for creating the appropriate HttpHandler to deal with the request. This gives you some additional flexibility in creating HttpHandlers. You could look inside an associated file to determine which handler should be called.

The Factory pattern also provides a way for you to potentially pre-create a number of handlers and hand them to ASP.NET when it requests one, without the overhead of creating one each and every time.

Let's look at an example. Listing 8.17 shows a class that implements IHttpHandlerFactory. ...