CODEWITHSUNDEEP
scalaakka
alatom
alatom

Reputation: 41

Factory actor pattern

Earlier I read that creating root(after /user/) actor (system.actorOf) is expensive.

Is there a common pattern to create ClientFactoryActor which main responsibility is simply return new actor on request(for example we need new websocket actor per client etc.)?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 104

Answers (1)

Ion Cojocaru
Ion Cojocaru

Reputation: 2583

Indeed you should try to maintain a hierarchy of actors for the error handling purposes (different supervision strategies) One of the convenient ways to create an actor is to have a companion object that returns a reference to the wanted actor instantiated with the given parameters (singleton factory) 

    object DemoActor {
      /**
       * Create Props for an actor of this type.
       *
       * @param magicNumber The magic number to be passed to this actor’s constructor.
       * @return a Props for creating this actor, which can then be further configured
       *         (e.g. calling `.withDispatcher()` on it)
       */
      def props(magicNumber: Int): Props = Props(new DemoActor(magicNumber))
    }

    class DemoActor(magicNumber: Int) extends Actor {
      def receive = {
        case x: Int => sender() ! (x + magicNumber)
      }
    }

    class SomeOtherActor extends Actor {
      // Props(new DemoActor(42)) would not be safe
      context.actorOf(DemoActor.props(42), "demo")
      // ...
    }

One good starting point is the Akka documentation page.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions