How to implement a parent message class to send common data between actors

[manig]

Thank you @drjdpowell. I thought sharing the enqueuer would open other problems like messages not following tree hierarchy. Cross-hierarchy links may lead to harder debugs and tight coupling. 

I was thinking more like the email being broadcasted to @allatcompany but there is @<name> so that the receiver can know if they need to act on it.

[CaseyM]

So it's the camera ROI and not the image (after the image has been captured) ROI - gotcha. In a situation like that I'd probably also use the enqueuer as the identifier since it's guaranteed to be unique for a specific actor. I'd be weary about using the enqueuer to shortcut the message tree - it can be done, but should be done judiciously. 

[BertMcMahan]

Throwing out an alternate idea here- does the camera actor need to be an actor? Could it just be a regular object? If the camera only does things when it's asked to, and there aren't any asynchronous bits, you could just have each of your Display actors make a method call on the object itself.

[manig]

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@BertMcMahan wrote:

Throwing out an alternate idea here- does the camera actor need to be an actor? Could it just be a regular object? If the camera only does things when it's asked to, and there aren't any asynchronous bits, you could just have each of your Display actors make a method call on the object itself.

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Thank you, BertMcMahan. I used the camera as an example to explain the problem or the need to differentiate the responses sent to all actors (broadcasted) using some ID. Even in the Camera use case, there will be an image streaming feature that requires it to be an actor so that it can send the streams to all subscribers. 

[manig]

Yes CaseyM, we can use Enqueuer as an ID. I am doing that now by adding it as an input to messages. As I am seeing similar use cases coming up now and then, I want to understand if ID sharing can be abstracted so that we don't need to add the ID as input to all the messages explicitly. For example, a message parent with the ID and all messages inheriting from it will have the ID data.