How to respond with the result of an actor call?

Question

How to respond with the result of an actor call?

2.1k views Asked by Piyush Jajoo At 28 October 2024 at 16:07

We are looking at using Akka-HTTP Java API - using Routing DSL.

It's not clear how to use the Routing functionality to respond to an HttpRequest; using an Untyped Akka Actor. For example, upon matching a Route path, how do we hand off the request to a "handler" ActorRef, which will then respond with a HttpResponse in a asynchronous way?

A similar question was posted on Akka-User mailing list, but with no followup solutions as such - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/akka-user/qHe3Ko7EVvg/KC-aKz_o5aoJ.

Original Q&A

There are 2 answers

tysonite On 01 November 2016 at 18:57

I have been looking the solution to the same problem as described by the author of the question. Finally, I came up to the following Java code for route creation:

    ActorRef ref = system.actorOf(Props.create(RequestHandlerActor.class));

    return get(() -> route(
            pathSingleSlash(() ->
                    extractRequest(httpRequest -> {
                        Timeout timeout = new Timeout(Duration.create(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS));
                        CompletionStage<HttpResponse> completionStage = PatternsCS.ask(ref, httpRequest, timeout)
                                .thenApplyAsync(HttpResponse.class::cast);

                        return completeWithFuture(completionStage);
                    })
            ))
    );

And RequestHandlerActor is:

public class RequestHandlerActor extends UntypedActor {
    @Override
    public void onReceive(Object msg) {
        if (msg instanceof HttpRequest) {
            HttpResponse httpResponse = HttpResponse.create()
                    .withEntity(ContentTypes.TEXT_HTML_UTF8,
                            "<html><body>Hello world!</body></html>");

            getSender().tell(httpResponse, getSelf());
        } else {
            unhandled(msg);
        }
    }
}

**Ramón J Romero y Vigil** · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-17 23:27:49

This can be accomplished with a combination of the onComplete directive and the ask pattern.

In the below example the RequestHandlerActor actor is used to create a HttpResponse based on the HttpRequest. This Actor is asked from within the route.

I have never used Java for routing code so my response is in Scala.

import scala.concurrent.duration._
import akka.actor.ActorSystem
import akka.http.scaladsl.model.HttpResponse
import akka.http.scaladsl.model.HttpRequest
import akka.actor.Actor
import akka.http.scaladsl.server.Directives._
import akka.actor.Props
import akka.pattern.ask
import akka.util.Timeout
import scala.util.{Success, Failure}
import akka.http.scaladsl.model.StatusCodes.InternalServerError

class RequestHandlerActor extends Actor {
  override def receive = {
    case httpRequest : HttpRequest =>
      sender() ! HttpResponse(entity = "actor responds nicely")
  }
}

implicit val actorSystem = ActorSystem()
implicit val timeout = Timeout(5 seconds)

val requestRef = actorSystem actorOf Props[RequestHandlerActor]

val route = 
  extractRequest { request =>
    onComplete((requestRef ? request).mapTo[HttpResponse]) {
      case Success(response) => complete(response)
      case Failure(ex) => 
        complete((InternalServerError, s"Actor not playing nice: ${ex.getMessage}"))
    } 
  }

This route can then be used passed into the bindAndHandle method like any other Flow.

TechQA.

How to respond with the result of an actor call?

There are 2 answers

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