I recently started developing using akka event sourcing/cluster sharding, and thanks to the online resources I think I understood the basic concepts and how to create a simple application with it. I am however struggling to apply this methodology in a slightly more complex data structure:
As an example, let's think about webpages and URLs. Each Page can be represented with an actor in the cluster (having its unique id as the path of the page, e.g. /questions/60037683).
On each page I can issue commands such as
Etc.
When issuing commands to single pages, everything is easy as it's "written on the manual". But I have the added the complexity that a web page can have children, so when creating a "child page" I need the parent to update references to its children.
I thought of some possible approaches, but they feel incomplete.
My real problem is, I think, handling the return of Futures properly when relaying messages to other actors that have to actually perform the job.
I'm making a lot of confusion and some reading resources would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your time.
EDIT: the first version was talking about a generical hierarchical file-system-like structure. I updated with the real purpose, webpages and urls and tried to clarify better my issues
After some months of searching, I reached the conclusion that what I'm doing is trying to have actors behave transactionally, so that when something is created, the parent is also updated in a safe manner, meaning that if one operation fails, all operations who completed successfully are rolled back. The best pattern for this, in my opinion, proved to be the saga pattern, which adds a bit of complexity to the whole process, but in the long run it does what I needed.
Basically I ended up implementing the main actor as a stand alone piece (as it should be) that can receive create commands and add children commands.
There is then a saga actor which takes care of creating the content, adding the child to the parent and rolling back everything if something fails during the process.
If someone else has a better solution, I'll be glad to hear it out