How do make a `CustomExecutionContext` available for dependency injection in a Play 2.6 controller? - scala

Question

I'm following along with Play 2.6's Scala documentation and sample code for creating non-blocking actions, and am running into some runtime issues. I have created a new Play application using the Scala template (sbt new playframework/play-scala-seed.g8).
The code that the Play documentation suggests should work in a new controller is (this code is taken verbatim from the Play documentation page, with some extra imports from me):
// some imports added by me to get the code to compile
import javax.inject.Inject
import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext
import scala.concurrent.Future
import akka.actor.ActorSystem
import play.api.libs.concurrent.CustomExecutionContext
import play.api.mvc._
import play.api.mvc.ControllerComponents
// end imports added by me
import play.api.libs.concurrent.CustomExecutionContext
trait MyExecutionContext extends ExecutionContext
class MyExecutionContextImpl #Inject()(system: ActorSystem)
extends CustomExecutionContext(system, "my.executor") with MyExecutionContext
class HomeController #Inject()(myExecutionContext: MyExecutionContext, val controllerComponents: ControllerComponents) extends BaseController {
def index = Action.async {
Future {
// Call some blocking API
Ok("result of blocking call")
}(myExecutionContext)
}
}
Then, according to the documentation for using other thread pools, I've defined the my.executor thread pool in the application.conf file of my application:
my.executor {
fork-join-executor {
parallelism-factor = 20.0
parallelism-max = 200
}
}
I should note that I do not want to use the default execution context as I want to prepare for running futures in a separate context that may be used for a limited resource like a database connection pool.
All of this compiles just fine with sbt compile. However, when I run this with sbt run and access my app in a web browser, I get this error:
CreationException: Unable to create injector, see the following errors:
1) No implementation for controllers.MyExecutionContext was bound.
while locating controllers.MyExecutionContext
for the 1st parameter of controllers.NewController.(NewController.scala:17)
while locating controllers.NewController
for the 2nd parameter of router.Routes.(Routes.scala:29)
at play.api.inject.RoutesProvider$.bindingsFromConfiguration(BuiltinModule.scala:121):
Binding(class router.Routes to self) (via modules: com.google.inject.util.Modules$OverrideModule -> play.api.inject.guice.GuiceableModuleConversions$$anon$1)
I've used Play 2.3 in the past, and know that dependency injection works when you define an instance of an object (via #Singleton or in a module); however, Play 2.6's documentation on DI indicates that "Guice is able to automatically instantiate any class with an #Inject on its constructor without having to explicitly bind it. This feature is called just in time bindings is described in more detail in the Guice documentation."
My question is: what specific lines of code or configuration do I need to add to Play's own sample to make this work, and why?

Answer 1

I found one possible solution when reading further in the Binding Annotations section of the Scala Dependency Injection documentation page. In particular, it states:
The simplest way to bind an implementation to an interface is to use the Guice #ImplementedBy annotation.
So, by adding that to the my MyExecutionContext trait, like so:
import com.google.inject.ImplementedBy
#ImplementedBy(classOf[MyExecutionContextImpl])
trait MyExecutionContext extends ExecutionContext
an instance of the MyExecutionContextImpl is instantiated and properly injected into the controller.
Too bad that this #ImplementedBy annotation isn't listed in the sample code for the non-blocking action documentation!