call methods on akka actors in scala

Question

I have a an actor defined as so:

class nodeActor(ID: String) extends Actor

which contains a method, which is used to set up the actor before it

Answer 1

You're not supposed to call an actor's methods directly from another class. It breaks the whole design of the system, which is

• to encapsulate the actor's specific implementation by communicating only with the ActorRef obtained with the call to actorOf or actorFor
• to limit communication between actors to message passing, using the available (!, ?) methods

If you need to create a reference in ActorA to another ActorB you can:

• Create the ref to ActorB in the ActorA's initialization code as shown in http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.0.3/scala/actors.html
• Send the ActorB's reference to the ActorA as a specific message. Then ActorA can store the reference within receive implementation

If you need to call a method to satisfy an Interface/Trait constraint, have a look at Typed Actors