---
title: PingGateway object model
description: Explains how PingGateway processes HTTP requests and responses through chains of filters and handlers, and describes the object model
component: pinggateway
version: 2026
page_id: pinggateway:about:about-processing
canonical_url: https://docs.pingidentity.com/pinggateway/2026/about/about-processing.html
revdate: 2025-04-02T12:24:35Z
---

# PingGateway object model

PingGateway processes HTTP requests and responses by passing them through user-defined chains of filters and handlers. The filters and handlers can access the request and response at each step in the chain. They make it possible to alter the request or response and collect contextual information.

The following image illustrates how PingGateway processes a request and response through a chain:

![The incoming request is processed by a request filter](_images/chain.svg)

When PingGateway processes a request, it first builds an object representation of the request. The object representation includes parsed query/form parameters, cookies, headers, and the entity. PingGateway initializes a runtime context to provide metadata about the request and applied transformations. PingGateway passes the request representation into the chain.

In the request flow, filters modify the request representation and can enrich the runtime context with computed information. A `ClientHandler` serializes the entity content and can encode additional query parameters as described in [RFC 3986: Query](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.4).

In the response flow, filters build a response representation with headers and the entity.

The route configuration in [Adding headers and logging results](../reference/HeaderFilter.html#HeaderFilter-example-logging) shows the flow through a chain to a protected application.