Actor initialization with parameters

[vallettea]

[I've been working a couple of days with your library and I wanted to thanks you because I really enjoy it.]

Coming back to my question, how can I initialize an actor with some parameters ?
When an actor is forked, it doesn't have access to the scope.

[weekens]

Custom actor parameters are not yet implemented in Comedy, but this feature should certainly be present.

There is, however, a resource injection mechanism in Comedy. It's not yet documented, but you can see examples in test/test-system.js ("should properly inject resources defined in contexts" and the like).

If shared resource is not what you need, you can try to get away with initialization message.

[vallettea]

Yes but you have the same problem when you define your context:

class MyContext {
      initialize() {
        this.resource = myVariable;
      }

      getResource() {
        return this.resource;
      }
    }

myVariable is unknown

[weekens]

Yes, the context with all it's resources is supposed to be self-contained.

In your case, the initialization message would work. Custom actor parameters will be implemented shortly.

[weekens]

Implemented in v0.1.0. Here is an example test:

it('should be able to pass custom parameters to child actor', P.coroutine(function*() {
  class MyActor {
    initialize(selfActor) {
      this.helloResponse = selfActor.getCustomParameters().helloResponse;
    }

    hello() {
      return this.helloResponse;
    }
  }

  // Create child actor with custom parameter.
  var childActor = yield rootActor.createChild(MyActor, {
    mode: 'forked',
    customParameters: { helloResponse: 'Hi there!' }
  });

  var response = yield childActor.sendAndReceive('hello');

  expect(response).to.be.equal('Hi there!');
}));

Enjoy!

[vallettea]

Works perfectly THANKS.

[vallettea]

It seems that if I put a function in the parameters it works for non-forked actor but that functions are filtered out of the parameters when the actor is forked.
Any idea how to pass functions as parameters for forked actors ?

[weekens]

Well, yeah, for now I've just added support for plain objects in custom parameters. Class and function passing will be done in a next step (you can create an issue for that).