In my last AkkaOfEmpires blog entry I started a Graphic User Interface (GUI), only on console mode, to display how the actors in my system behave. In this project I use the Akka.NET framework (implementation of the actor model)  to re-create some of the rules present in Age of Empires II.

I was able to add a “console” implementation for two actors on the three I currently have in the system. This last actor is harder to “override” because its creation is done by another actor. Here is the code I am talking about (inside the VillagerActor):

var props = Props.Create<ResourceHarvesterActor>(Context.System.Scheduler, Self);
var resourceHarvesterRoutine = Context.ActorOf(props);

An I would like to use the following implementation of the ResourceHarvesterActor.

public class ConsoleResourceHarvesterActor : ResourceHarvesterActor
{
    public ConsoleResourceHarvesterActor(ITellScheduler messageScheduler, IActorRef villagerAcor)
        : base(messageScheduler, villagerAcor)
    {
    }
 
    public override void Handle(ResourceHarvested message)
    {
        base.Handle(message);
        Console.WriteLine("1 unit of {0} harvested. (carrying {1}).", ResourceToHarvest, CurrentlyCarrying);
    }
}

But, as I said in my last article, I cannot directly use this class in the VillagerActor, because it would create a circular reference and I don’t want to have “GUI” classes in my “core” project.

I think this issue shows that there is some coupling in the VillagerActor, indeed the class directly use the Props API and the Context. I believe it would be a good thing to extract this part of the code and encapsulate it in a dependency.

An actor factory

To fix this issue I will create a factory which will deal with the creation of the subroutine for the other actors and I will be able to use this class as a dependency for the VillagerActor. This way I will remove some coupling in the code.

Here is the factory:

public class SubroutinesFactory
{
    public virtual IActorRef CreateResourceHarvesterActor(IActorContext actorContext, IActorRef villagerActor)
    {
        var props = Props.Create<ResourceHarvesterActor>(actorContext.System.Scheduler, villagerActor);
        var resourceHarvesterRoutine = actorContext.ActorOf(props);
        return resourceHarvesterRoutine;
    }
}

The method in this factory needs some parameters to do its job, first an actor context in order to access the Scheduler and to create the IActorRef instance, secondly the IActorRef for the VillagerActor needing the subroutine.

I can now update my code to use this new class.

public class VillagerActor : ReceiveActor
{
    private readonly IActorRef _resourcesSupervisor;
    private readonly SubroutinesFactory _subroutinesFactory;
 
    public VillagerActor(IActorRef resourcesSupervisor, SubroutinesFactory subroutinesFactory)
    {
        _resourcesSupervisor = resourcesSupervisor;
        _subroutinesFactory = subroutinesFactory;
        //...
    }
 
    //...
 
    protected virtual void ResourceHarvester(IHarvestResourceCommand command)
    {
        //...
 
        var resourceHarvesterRoutine = _subroutinesFactory.CreateResourceHarvesterActor(Context, Self);
        resourceHarvesterRoutine.Tell(command);
 
        //...
    }
 
    //...
}

Override in the GUI

Now, the good thing is that I can create another implementation for this factory in my Console GUI project to use the ConsoleResourceHarvesterActor instead of the regular ResourceHarvesterActor.

public class ConsoleSubroutinesFactory : SubroutinesFactory
{
    public override IActorRef CreateResourceHarvesterActor(IActorContext actorContext, IActorRef villagerActor)
    {
        var props = Props.Create<ConsoleResourceHarvesterActor>(actorContext.System.Scheduler, villagerActor);
        var consoleActor = actorContext.ActorOf(props);
        return consoleActor;
    }
}

And now I can update my program in the GUI project to inject the implementation I want.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var system = AkkaOfEmpiresSystem.Start();
 
    var supervisorProps = Props.Create<ConsoleResourcesSupervisorActor>();
    var supervisor = system.ActorOf(supervisorProps);
 
    var consoleSubroutinesFactory = new ConsoleSubroutinesFactory();
    var villagerProps = Props.Create<ConsoleVillagerActor>(supervisor, consoleSubroutinesFactory);
    var gathered = system.ActorOf(villagerProps);
    gathered.Tell(new GatherFruits());
 
    system.AwaitTermination();
}

(To avoid too much flooding on the console I put only one villager instead of three).

And when launching the application, we can see the following output, letting us know what is happening.

We now have what we wanted, information is displayed for each actor and we have a pretty good idea of what is going on. The overall behavior looks good.

In this post I showed a way to extract the logic of creating an actor in a dependency in order to override the behavior, you can find the entire solution here.

For the moment my project is quite small and I only have two levels in my class hierarchy, therefore this “factory” fix will be hard to continue in the future because I have to inject the dependencies at the “boundaries” (the Main() method in my case). In the next AkkaOfEmpires post I will introduce Dependency Injection (DI) when working with Akka.NET to remove this future problem.

See you next time!