Golang: consume items for multiple workers from channel in `case` statement

Question

My consumer (run from main ) supports context cancellation and reading from a channel via case statement. I can shutdown the consumer with the context, that works fine. However, when I spawn several workers in one case statement, every worker is given the same job (message) from jobsChan , which is not what I want:

func (app *App) consumer() {
    for {
        select {
        case <-app.ctx.Done():
            app.infoLog.Print("Caught SIGINT, stopping.")
            app.wg.Wait()
            app.doneChan <- struct{}{} # main uses this channel to block itself until all goroutines are stopped
            app.infoLog.Print("Shutting down the consumer...")
            return
        case job := <-app.jobsChan:
            // PROBLEM here: wrong, each worker is given the same job
            for workerNumber := 0; workerNumber < app.config.workers; workerNumber++ {
                app.wg.Add(1)
                go app.workerFunc(workerNumber, job)
            }
        }
    }
}

func (app *App) workerFunc(id int, job Job) {
    defer app.wg.Done()
    
    ... actual worker code here ...
}

How can I rewrite this code so that I can keep select for app.ctx.Done channel and at the same time can spawn workers so that each worker picks next message from the channel as a Job? I need to keep for/select to listen for ctx cancellation but at the same time I need to spawn X workers reading messages from jobsChan in the consumer. Is this possible?

The only alternative that comes to mind is passing channel directly into spawned workerFunc and have another for job := range app.jobsChan in the workerFunc . But then the whole case job := <-app.jobsChan: in the consumer becomes pointless and I am not sure how to rewrite it.

To clarify: When I run the app, I expect every worker to have a new job id pulled from the jobsChan - but they all process the same, eg 1, then they all process the next one, eg 2

#wrong
Worker 0: start processing item 1
Worker 2: start processing item 1
Worker 1: start processing item 1

Answer 1

Your existing code explicitly assigns the same job to all the workers. If you have a fixed number of workers, create goroutines for them (during initialization), and have them listen to a channel:

for workerNumber:0;workerNumber<app.config.workers;workerNumber++ {
   go app.workerFunc(ctx,workerNumber,app.jobsChan)
}

In each worker, simply check the jobQueue and the context cancellation.

In other words, you don't need the consumer , pass jobs directly to the workers.