Creating a flow from actor in Akka Streams

Question

It\'s possible to create sources and sinks from actors using Source.actorPublisher() and Sink.actorSubscriber() methods respectively. But is it pos

Answer 1

Konrad's solution demonstrates how to create a custom stage that utilizes Actors, but in most cases I think that is a bit overkill.

Usually you have some Actor that is capable of responding to questions:

val actorRef : ActorRef = ???

type Input = ???
type Output = ???

val queryActor : Input => Future[Output] = 
  (actorRef ? _) andThen (_.mapTo[Output])

This can be easily utilized with basic Flow functionality which takes in the maximum number of concurrent requests:

val actorQueryFlow : Int => Flow[Input, Output, _] =
  (parallelism) => Flow[Input].mapAsync[Output](parallelism)(queryActor)

Now actorQueryFlow can be integrated into any stream...