on demand actor get or else create

Question

I can create actors with actorOf and look them with actorFor. I now want to get an actor by some id:String and if it doesnt exist, I w

Answer 1

Actors can only be created by their parent, and from your description I assume that you are trying to have the system create a non-toplevel actor, which will always fail. What you should do is to send a message to the parent saying “give me that child here”, then the parent can check whether that currently exists, is in good health, etc., possibly create a new one and then respond with an appropriate result message.

To reiterate this extremely important point: get-or-create can ONLY ever be done by the direct parent.