.. _transactors-scala:

#####################
 Transactors (Scala)
#####################


Why Transactors?
================

Actors are excellent for solving problems where you have many independent
processes that can work in isolation and only interact with other Actors through
message passing. This model fits many problems. But the actor model is
unfortunately a terrible model for implementing truly shared state. E.g. when
you need to have consensus and a stable view of state across many
components. The classic example is the bank account where clients can deposit
and withdraw, in which each operation needs to be atomic. For detailed
discussion on the topic see `this JavaOne presentation
<http://www.slideshare.net/jboner/state-youre-doing-it-wrong-javaone-2009>`_.

STM on the other hand is excellent for problems where you need consensus and a
stable view of the state by providing compositional transactional shared
state. Some of the really nice traits of STM are that transactions compose, and
it raises the abstraction level from lock-based concurrency.

Akka's Transactors combine Actors and STM to provide the best of the Actor model
(concurrency and asynchronous event-based programming) and STM (compositional
transactional shared state) by providing transactional, compositional,
asynchronous, event-based message flows.

Generally, the STM is not needed very often when working with Akka. Some
use-cases (that we can think of) are:

- When you really need composable message flows across many actors updating
  their **internal local** state but need them to do that atomically in one big
  transaction. Might not be often but when you do need this then you are
  screwed without it.

- When you want to share a datastructure across actors.


Actors and STM
==============

You can combine Actors and STM in several ways. An Actor may use STM internally
so that particular changes are guaranteed to be atomic. Actors may also share
transactional datastructures as the STM provides safe shared state across
threads.

It's also possible to coordinate transactions across Actors or threads so that
either the transactions in a set all commit successfully or they all fail. This
is the focus of Transactors and the explicit support for coordinated
transactions in this section.


Coordinated transactions
========================

Akka provides an explicit mechanism for coordinating transactions across
Actors. Under the hood it uses a ``CommitBarrier``, similar to a CountDownLatch.

Here is an example of coordinating two simple counter Actors so that they both
increment together in coordinated transactions. If one of them was to fail to
increment, the other would also fail.

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#coordinated-example

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#run-coordinated-example

Note that creating a ``Coordinated`` object requires a ``Timeout`` to be
specified for the coordinated transaction. This can be done implicitly, by
having an implicit ``Timeout`` in scope, or explicitly, by passing the timeout
when creating a a ``Coordinated`` object. Here's an example of specifying an
implicit timeout:

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#implicit-timeout

To start a new coordinated transaction that you will also participate in, just
create a ``Coordinated`` object (this assumes an implicit timeout):

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#create-coordinated

To start a coordinated transaction that you won't participate in yourself you
can create a ``Coordinated`` object with a message and send it directly to an
actor. The recipient of the message will be the first member of the coordination
set:

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#send-coordinated

To receive a coordinated message in an actor simply match it in a case
statement:

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#receive-coordinated
   :exclude: coordinated-atomic

To include another actor in the same coordinated transaction that you've created
or received, use the apply method on that object. This will increment the number
of parties involved by one and create a new ``Coordinated`` object to be sent.

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#include-coordinated

To enter the coordinated transaction use the atomic method of the coordinated
object:

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#coordinated-atomic

The coordinated transaction will wait for the other transactions before
committing. If any of the coordinated transactions fail then they all fail.

.. note::

   The same actor should not be added to a coordinated transaction more than
   once. The transaction will not be able to complete as an actor only processes
   a single message at a time. When processing the first message the coordinated
   transaction will wait for the commit barrier, which in turn needs the second
   message to be received to proceed.


Transactor
==========

Transactors are actors that provide a general pattern for coordinating
transactions, using the explicit coordination described above.

Here's an example of a simple transactor that will join a coordinated
transaction:

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#counter-example

You could send this Counter transactor a ``Coordinated(Increment)`` message. If
you were to send it just an ``Increment`` message it will create its own
``Coordinated`` (but in this particular case wouldn't be coordinating
transactions with any other transactors).

To coordinate with other transactors override the ``coordinate`` method. The
``coordinate`` method maps a message to a set of ``SendTo`` objects, pairs of
``ActorRef`` and a message. You can use the ``include`` and ``sendTo`` methods
to easily coordinate with other transactors. The ``include`` method will send on
the same message that was received to other transactors. The ``sendTo`` method
allows you to specify both the actor to send to, and the message to send.

Example of coordinating an increment:

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#friendly-counter-example

Using ``include`` to include more than one transactor:

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#coordinate-include

Using ``sendTo`` to coordinate transactions but pass-on a different message than
the one that was received:

.. includecode:: code/docs/transactor/TransactorDocSpec.scala#coordinate-sendto

To execute directly before or after the coordinated transaction, override the
``before`` and ``after`` methods. These methods also expect partial functions
like the receive method. They do not execute within the transaction.

To completely bypass coordinated transactions override the ``normally``
method. Any message matched by ``normally`` will not be matched by the other
methods, and will not be involved in coordinated transactions. In this method
you can implement normal actor behavior, or use the normal STM atomic for local
transactions.
