It I was an interesting finding this week. I was not aware that it is possible to use multi-line C# code snippets inside Azure API Management policies.
For example if you’d like to calculate an expression (could be e.g. a backend service query parameter) based on a request header value, that you could use a snippet similar to this one:
@{
/* here you can place multi-line code */
new dict = new Dictionary<string, string>() {
{"a", "1"},
{"b", "2"}
};
var val = context.Request.Headers.GetValueOrDefault("test", "a");
return dict.ContainsKey(val) ? dict[val] : "1";
}
Details about expressions syntax can be found here: here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-policy-expressions
One gotch’a was with moving that kind of policy definition to Terraform. It is necessary to replace characters “<” and “>” with entities: < and > respectively. Otherwise Tarraform could not apply the changes, although it worked directly in Azure portal.
Worth to note that you could achieve the same by using control flow policies, but this example is only an illustration, you can have more complex snippets e.g. for request verification or composing/manipulating response body.