Streaming an http response within a composed action in Play! Framework 2.1

Question

I'm creating an authentication action that wraps other actions, using the Play Zentasks sample app as a template. One of the things that this needs to be able to do, is hit a webservice in certain circumstances, in order to retrieve a user's details. I want to do this in a non-blocking fashion, but I don't want to have to pass a future back to the action that I'm wrapping.

The only way that I can think of doing this is by using Enumerator.fromStream() with an InputStream pulled from a URL object. I'm guessing this isn't the best way though, since it seems like a duplication of efforts (considering the ws object). The async ws api (and underlying asynchttpclient) returns a Future for everything however. I don't suppose anyone has tackled this issue before and could point me in another direction? Is there something that I'm missing? Also, would using a Enumerator.fromStream() as I've suggested definitely not block?

Thanks in advance,

Suche

Answer 1

You can use the async WS api. When it returns a future, you can call map on that, and pass the value to the action you're wrapping. Now you have a future containing the result of your wrapped action. Turn that into an AsyncResult or just wrap the whole thing in an Async{} block and it should work.