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restcqrsevent-sourcingeventual-consistencyaxon

Axon - How to retrieve the new entity version number in the CommandHandler?

I'm currently writing a distributed application with a microservice architecture.
For that I am applying the CQRS pattern and event sourcing with the help of the axon framework. Therefore the data is eventual consistent.
Both, the write and the read side, are accessible over HTTP; REST specifically.

The initial problem:
After updating/creating an entity, the user [1] should be able to see the results. Because the events are handled asynchronously, the client/UI doesn't know when the entity is really updated (or created). So when the client fetches the data after sending the update-request but before the event is processed, the unchanged data is returned. Therefore the user could think, that the application is broken and/or sends a new request.

Solution attempt:
While looking for a solution for the read-after-write problem I came accross this blog entry.
There is proposed to return the new entity version in the write response. The client can then request the data with the expected entity version (as Expect header). If the actual version is equal or greater than the expected version, the data is returned. Or else an empty response with a Retry-After Header is returned.

The problem:

When the client sends an UpdateFoo request to the write side, the application sends a corresponding UpdateFooCommand over the CommandGateway. The Command is processed by the entity aggregate which publishes the FooUpdatedEvent. The read side receives this event and updates its entity view which can be accessed over the REST interface of the read side.
This is controlled by the axon framework. The handlers are annotated with @CommandHandler and @EventSourcingHandler respectively.
Now: How can I access the new version number of the affected entity in the CommandHandler, so that this number can be returned in the update response?

Thanks in advance

[1] Not only users. There can als be non human clients.

Solution

  • you can use AggregateLifecycle.getVersion() from within your aggregate. You can choose to return that value as part of your command's results and pass that information when doing a query. If the query doesn't have that version number of the aggregate's information, yet, you can (wait and) retry.