How to respond with the result of an actor call?

Question

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.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 22 '16 at 21:16

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.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 01 '16 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);
        }
    }
}

How to respond with the result of an actor call?

2 Answers2

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