C# protoactor - alternative to Akka.NETs pipeto?

Question

In Akka and Akka.Net there is the PipeTo pattern for handling asynchrounous stuff (like I/O) and pipe a message back to the actor´s messagebox. How can that be done in Protoactor?

Answer 1

There are two ways to deal with asynchronous actions in Proto.Actor. The first would be to simply await the task as Proto.Actor has full support for async await. But as you might know, this will prevent the actor from processing other messages during the await.

The other alternative, which is similar to PipeTo is ReenterAfter. This does the same as PipeTo but does not send a message but rather triggers a callback:

public Task ReceiveAsync(IContext context)
{
     var task = GetSomeAsyncTask(...);
     context.ReenterAfter(task, t => {
         //code inside here will run when the task completes.
         //still preserving actor concurrency constraints
     });
}

This often makes the code easier to reason about than PipeTo as that forces you to send a message and add another message handler. with ReenterAfter, you get the same effect, still concurrency constrained by the actor, but you can build entire workflows this way.