Scalatra is an awesome, lightweight web framework for Scala. It’s perfect for building REST APIs. One of its less known features is support for asynchronous programming using Scala’s Futures. By mixing in the FutureSupport trait one can easily make their servlet asynchronous. Once this trait is mixed-in into your servlet class, you can return Futures in your post and get handlers and Scalatra will automagically take care of them. Recently I encountered a minor issue with Scalatra’s support for Futures - it is not possible to access params or request values from code inside a Future. The below code throws a NullPointerException.

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get("/someResource/:id") {
facebookService.signInAsync("someLogin", "somePassword") flatMap { facebookUser ->
val id = params("id")
database.getResourceAsync(facebookUser, id)
}
}

Scalatra exposes access to contextual data such as the current user or request parameters via members such as params or request. These values are implemeted as DynamicVariables. Dynamic variables is Scala’s feature which allows a val to have different values in different scopes. The point is that DynamicVariable implementation is based on Java’s ThreadLocal. Therefore, when executing code in a Future you may not rely on these values since you might be on another thread! An obvious solution to this problem is to retrieve request parameters before entering the Future:

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get("/someResource/:id") {
val id = params("id")
facebookService.signInAsync("someLogin", "somePassword") flatMap { facebookUser ->
database.getResourceAsync(facebookUser, id)
}
}

However, this is not always a very convenient solution. I came up with the following workaround:

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get("/someResource/:id") {
val currentRequest = request
facebookService.signInAsync("someLogin", "somePassword") flatMap { facebookUser ->
withRequest(currentRequest) {
val id = params("id")
database.getResourceAsync(facebookUser, id)
}
}
}

Firstly, we take a copy of the current request. Later, inside the Future we tell Scalatra to substitute the request dynamic variable’s value with our copy. Therefore, the call to params will use the correct request and there will be no error.

Update

As I recently learned, there is a much better way to solve this issue that is actually built into Scalatra. The way to go is using the AsyncResult class. Our example would look like this:

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get("/someResource/:id") {
new AsyncResult { val is =
facebookService.signInAsync("someLogin", "somePassword") flatMap { facebookUser ->
val id = params("id")
database.getResourceAsync(facebookUser, id)
}
}
}

AsyncResult is an abstract class. We create an instance of anonymous type that extends it and overrides is value. AsyncResult takes copies of current request and response values when created and makes them available to code inside is . You can find more information here.