When or if to Dispose HttpResponseMessage when calling ReadAsStreamAsync?

Question

I am using the System.Net.Http.HttpClient to do some client-side HTTP communication. I've got all of the HTTP in one spot, abstracted away from the rest of the code. In one instance I want to read the response content as a stream, but the consumer of the stream is well insulated from where the HTTP communication happens and the stream is opened. In the spot responsible for HTTP communication I am disposing of all of the HttpClient stuff.

This unit test will fail at Assert.IsTrue(stream.CanRead):

[TestMethod]
public async Task DebugStreamedContent()
{
    Stream stream = null; // in real life the consumer of the stream is far away 
    var client = new HttpClient();        
    client.BaseAddress = new Uri("https://www.google.com/", UriKind.Absolute);

    using (var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Get, "/"))
    using (var response = await client.SendAsync(request))
    {
        response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
        //here I would return the stream to the caller
        stream = await response.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync();
    }

    Assert.IsTrue(stream.CanRead); // FAIL if response is disposed so is the stream
}

I typically try to dispose of anything IDisposable at the earliest possible convenience but in this case, disposing the HttpResponseMessage also disposes the Stream returned from ReadAsStreamAsync.

So it seems like the calling code needs to know about and take ownership of the response message as well as the stream, or I leave the response message undisposed and let the finalizer deal with it. Neither option feels right.

This answer talks about not disposing the HttpClient. How about the HttpRequestMessage and/or HttpResponseMessage?

Am I missing something? I am hoping to keep the consuming code ignorant of HTTP but leaving all these undisposed objects around goes against year of habit!

Answer 1

So it seems like the calling code needs to know about and take ownership of the response message as well as the stream, or I leave the response message undisposed and let the finalizer deal with it. Neither option feels right.

In this specific case, there are no finalizers. Neither HttpResponseMessage or HttpRequestMessage implement a finalizer (and that's a good thing!). If you don't dispose of either of them, they will get garbage collected once the GC kicks in, and the handle to their underlying streams will be collected once that happens.

As long as you're using these objects, don't dispose. Once done, dispose of them. Instead of wrapping them in a using statement, you can always explicitly call Dispose once you're done. Either way the consuming code doesn't need to have any knowledge underlying http requests.