Creating your first Actor

Note
Since Akka.NET enforces parental supervision every actor is supervised and (potentially) the supervisor of its children, it is advisable that you familiarize yourself with Actor Systems and Supervision and Monitoring and it may also help to read Actor References, Paths and Addresses.

Defining an Actor class

Actors in C# are implemented by extending the ReceiveActor class and configuring what messages to receive using the Receive<TMessage> method.

Here is an example:

using Akka;
using Akka.Actor;
using Akka.Event;

public class MyActor: ReceiveActor
{
  LoggingAdapter log = Logging.GetLogger(Context);

  public MyActor()
  {
    Receive<string>(message => {
      log.Info("Received String message: {0}", message);
      Sender.Tell(message);
    });
    Receive<SomeMessage(message => {...});
  }
}

The Inbox

When writing code outside of actors which shall communicate with actors, the ask pattern can be a solution (see below), but there are two things it cannot do: receiving multiple replies (e.g. by subscribing an ActorRef to a notification service) and watching other actors’ lifecycle. For these purposes there is the Inbox class:

var target = system.ActorOf(Props.Empty);
var inbox = Inbox.Create(system);

inbox.Send(target, "hello");

try
{
    inbox.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)).Equals("world");
}
catch (TimeoutException)
{
    // timeout
}

The send method wraps a normal tell and supplies the internal actor’s reference as the sender. This allows the reply to be received on the last line. Watching an actor is quite simple as well:

using System.Diagnostics;
...
var inbox = Inbox.Create(system);
inbox.Watch(target);
target.Tell(PoisonPill.Instance, ActorRefs.NoSender);

try
{
    Debug.Assert(inbox.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)) is Terminated);
}
catch (TimeoutException)
{
    // timeout
}

F

TODO