Does CompletableFuture have a corresponding Local context?

Question

In the olden days, we had ThreadLocal for programs to carry data along with the request path since all request processing was done on that thread and stuff like Logback used this with MDC.put("requestId", getNewRequestId());

Then Scala and functional programming came along and Futures came along and with them came Local.scala (at least I know the twitter Futures have this class). Future.scala knows about Local.scala and transfers the context through all the map/flatMap, etc. etc. functionality such that I can still do Local.set("requestId", getNewRequestId()); and then downstream after it has travelled over many threads, I can still access it with Local.get(...)

Soooo, my question is in Java, can I do the same thing with the new CompletableFuture somewhere with LocalContext or some object (not sure of the name) and in this way, I can modify Logback MDC context to store it in that context instead of a ThreadLocal such that I don't lose the request id and all my logs across the thenApply, thenAccept, etc. etc. still work just fine with logging and the -XrequestId flag in Logback configuration.

EDIT:

As an example. If you have a request come in and you are using Log4j or Logback, in a filter, you will set MDC.put("requestId", requestId) and then in your app, you will log many log statements line this:

log.info("request came in for url="+url);
log.info("request is complete");

Now, in the log output it will show this:

INFO {time}: requestId425 request came in for url=/mypath
INFO {time}: requestId425 request is complete

This is using a trick of ThreadLocal to achieve this. At Twitter, we use Scala and Twitter Futures in Scala along with a Local.scala class. Local.scala and Future.scala are tied together in that we can achieve the above scenario still which is very nice and all our log statements can log the request id so the developer never has to remember to log the request id and you can trace through a single customers request response cycle with that id.

I don't see this in Java :( which is very unfortunate as there are many use cases for that. Perhaps there is something I am not seeing though?

Answer 1

If you come across this, just poke the thread here http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2017-May/047867.html

to implement something like twitter Futures which transfer Locals (Much like ThreadLocal but transfers state).

See the def respond() method in here and how it calls Locals.save() and Locals.restort() https://github.com/simonratner/twitter-util/blob/master/util-core/src/main/scala/com/twitter/util/Future.scala

If Java Authors would fix this, then the MDC in logback would work across all 3rd party libraries. Until then, IT WILL NOT WORK unless you can change the 3rd party library(doubtful you can do that).