Dogs Chasing Squirrels

A software development blog

Akka.NET and Unity IoC

5

Even though Akka.NET supposedly supports dependency injection through its DI libraries (e.g. Akka.DI.Unity), it’s not very good. In the documentation you’ll see examples like:

Context.DI().Props<MyActor>()

That Props call doesn’t take any arguments so there’s no way to actually inject parameters into the call. Let’s say we have this actor:

public class MyActor : ReceiveActor {
  public MyActor( string a, IFoo b, IBar c ) {
    // ...
  }
}

Further say we want to specify a but let Unity resolve IFoo and IBar from configuration. If we were just creating the object normally we would write:

var myActor = UnityContainer.Resolve<MyActor>( 
  new ParameterOverride( "a", "ABC" ) 
  );

But that’s not how we create actors. We create actors using ActorOf and specify Props. We do this so that Akka.Net can recreate the actors if they fail.

If we were to create the actor normally without dependency injection we would write something like:

var myActorRef = actorRefFactory.ActorOf( 
  Props.Create( () => new MyActor( "ABC", ??, ?? ) 
  );

If we do that, we aren’t getting our interfaces from Unity.

So let’s try dependency injection. If we were to use Akka.DI.Unity we would have:

var myActorRef = actorRefFactory.ActorOf(
  Context.DI.Props<MyActor>() 
  );

But then there’s no way to specify our parameter.
We’re stuck. We can specify all parameters or none but can’t specify some and let unity take care of the others like we usually want.

Here’s a way you can do it that doesn’t involve the Akka.DI libraries:

IIndirectActorProducer

It turns out that Props is not the only way to create an actor. If you dive into the source code, you can see that there’s a IIndirectActorProducer class that will create an actor without Props by implementing a Produce method.
Here’s an implementation that takes a IUnityContainer and the ResolverOverrides in its constructor and uses them to create the actor when called:

    /// <summary>
    /// A <see cref="IIndirectActorProducer" /> that uses a <see cref="IUnityContainer" /> to resolve instances.
    /// </summary>
    /// <remarks>
    /// This is only used directly by the <see cref="UnityActorRefFactory"/>
    /// </remarks>
    /// <typeparam name="TActor"></typeparam>
    internal sealed class UnityActorProducer<TActor> : IIndirectActorProducer where TActor : ActorBase {

        /// <summary>
        /// The resolver overrides.
        /// </summary>
        private readonly ResolverOverride[] _resolverOverrides;
        /// <summary>
        /// The unity container.
        /// </summary>
        private readonly IUnityContainer _unityContainer;

        /// <summary>
        /// The constructor.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="unityContainer">The unity container.</param>
        /// <param name="resolverOverrides">The resolver overrides.</param>
        public UnityActorProducer( IUnityContainer unityContainer, params ResolverOverride[] resolverOverrides ) {
            this._unityContainer = unityContainer.CreateChildContainer();
            this._resolverOverrides = resolverOverrides;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// See <see cref="IIndirectActorProducer.ActorType"/>
        /// </summary>
        public Type ActorType => typeof( TActor );

        /// <summary>
        /// See <see cref="IIndirectActorProducer.Produce" />
        /// </summary>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public ActorBase Produce() {
            // Create the actor using our overrides
            return this._unityContainer.Resolve<TActor>( this._resolverOverrides );
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// SEe <see cref="IIndirectActorProducer.Release" />
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="actor"></param>
        public void Release( ActorBase actor ) {
            // Do nothing
        }

    }

We can create Props using the producer like this:

        /// <summary>
        /// Creates <see cref="Akka.Actor.Props" /> using the <see cref="IUnityContainer" /> and any <see cref="ResolverOverride" />s provided.
        /// </summary>
        /// <typeparam name="TActor"></typeparam>
        /// <param name="unityContainer"></param>
        /// <param name="resolverOverrides"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public Props Props<TActor>( IUnityContainer unityContainer, params ResolverOverride[] resolverOverrides ) where TActor : ActorBase {
            // Use a UnityActorProducer to create the object using the container and resolver overrides.
            return Akka.Actor.Props.CreateBy<UnityActorProducer<TActor>>( 
                unityContainer, 
                resolverOverrides 
                );
        }

So creating our actor would look like this:

var myActorRef = Context.ActorOf(
  Props<MyActor>( 
    unityContainer, 
    new ParameterOverride( "a", "ABC" ) 
  )
  );

It uses our resolver overrides for the first parameter and the unity configuration for our additional parameters, just as we want.

5 thoughts on “Akka.NET and Unity IoC

      1. Gabor

        The UnityActorProducer class above has XML comments that contain this remark:

        /// This is only used directly by the

  1. Mike Bennett Post author

    Ah, gotcha. My final version never used it – I have an extension on the actor context that produces a DI() object that provides the Props method, so it ends up like ActorContext.DI().ActorOf( overrides )

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