Identifying Message Sender

[ihyd-zmay]

I have a calling actor that can spawn multiple nested actors of the same type. Since they all send the same message(s) back to the calling actor, I'm trying to implement a method for the calling actor to know which child sent the message.

Is there something built-in for this, or do I just need to manually include some data (like the nested actors enqueuer for example) that the calling actor can use to determine who sent the message? It seems like this would be a common issue with the framework, so I assume there's something already in place that I'm just not familiar with already.

Thanks in advance for any and all help!

[AristosQueue · Accepted solution]

The Enqueuer object serves as a unique identifier. The nested can send its self-enqueuer object as part of the message. Caller already has this object, so no violation of AF rules. Caller can use that to reply to the nested and to know which nested sent the message. 

[AristosQueue]

PS : it isn’t built into every message since that would be major size bloat. You bundle it in as data for the messages that need it. 

[ihyd-zmay]

That's a fair point! I just thought that might be a common occurrence, but I suppose it's not when you think about the vast number of messages being sent in most applications.

Thanks for the info!

[BertMcMahan]

If you're doing a fair number of these it might be worth it to make an intermediate Message.lvclass override that wrapped up some of that functionality for you. It would let you decouple the "Message ID" behavior from the rest of the message.