Akka: Testing messages sent to child actors

I previously blogged about testing messages sent back to the sender. Another common scenario is testing that an actor sends the correct message to a child. A piece of code that does this might look like:

	class ParentActor extends Actor {
	def receive: Actor.Receive = {
	case msg @ _ => {
	println(s"Received msg, delegating work to a child actor")
	val childActor = context.actorOf(Props[ChildActor])
	childActor ! "Go and do something important!"
	}
	}
	}

view raw ParentActor.scala hosted with ❤ by GitHub

But how do you test drive this kind of code?

	class ParentActorTest extends TestKit(ActorSystem("TestSystem")) with FunSuiteLike {
	test("Should delegate the important work to the client") {
	val underTest = TestActorRef(new ParentActor)
	underTest ! "Go do some work"
	// how do i test this?
	}
	}

view raw ParentActorTest.scala hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I've adopted the approach of removing the responsibility of creating the child from the ParentActor. To do this you can pass in a factory to the ParentActor's constructor that can be replaced for testing. To do this the ParentActor is changed to look like this:

	class ParentActor(childFactory: (ActorRefFactory) => ActorRef) extends Actor {
	def receive: Actor.Receive = {
	case msg @ _ => {
	println(s"Received msg, delegating work to a child actor")
	val childActor = childFactory(context)
	childActor ! "Go and do something important!"
	}
	}
	}

view raw ParentActor.scala hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The ParentActor now takes in a factory function which takes in an ActorFactoryRef and returns a ActorRef. This function is responsible for creating the ChildActor.

childFactory: (ActorRefFactory) => ActorRef

This is then used by the ParentActor as follows:

val childActor = childFactory(context)

You can now inject a TestProbe for testing rather than using a real ActorFactorRef. For example:

	class ParentActorTest extends TestKit(ActorSystem("TestSystem")) with FunSuiteLike {
	test("Should delegate the important work to the client") {
	val testProbeForChild = TestProbe()
	val underTest = TestActorRef(new ParentActor(_ => testProbeForChild.ref))
	underTest ! "Go do some work"
	testProbeForChild.expectMsg("Go and do something important!")
	}
	}

view raw ParentActorTest.scala hosted with ❤ by GitHub

And for the real code you can pass in an anonymous function that uses the ActorRefFactory to actually create a real ChildActor:

	test("Using a real child actor") {
	val underTest = TestActorRef(new ParentActor(actorFactory => actorFactory.actorOf(Props[ChildActor])))
	underTest ! "Go do some work"
	// Can't test this but shows how to crate a ParentActor in production code
	}

view raw ParentActorTest.scala hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Here you can see the ActorFactoryRef (context in Actors implement this interface) is used to create an Actor the same way as the original ParentActor did.

Full source code here.