Akka HTTP, docs: Explain toStrict in more detail

Issue by ktoso Tuesday Sep 29, 2015 at 18:00 GMT Originally opened as https://github.com/akka/akka/issues/18599

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Based on gitter feedback, we mention toStrict a bit in the model's page, however people are looking for "how do I get a string out". We should answer that question AND explain why it may not be the best idea, then we can ease them into thinking about streaming.

Is this (https://gist.github.com/hakuch/1cd0bdc051bf9d7e8e41) the easiest way to get the body of an HTTP response in a human-readable format? We are using the host-level client, so all responses should be strictly populated. It seems awfully involved to convert the byte stream to a strict Stream. Surely there must be an easier way? *strict String

ktoso 19:54 okey, here we go then :smile:

1. being host level does not mean that the response is immediatly available
2. Sink.head only takes the first chunk, if the content is very long that's not what you wanted - you want all the chunks together into the string
3. try to avoid Await, instead just .map{ data => } on the future
4. there's a helper :smile: wait...

Docs would be more or less so:

koso 19:56 you want to make the entity "strict", read about the data model here: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka-stream-and-http-experimental/1.0/scala/http/common/http-model.html#HttpEntity Streaming entity types (i.e. all but Strict) cannot be shared or serialized. To create a strict, sharable copy of an entity or message use HttpEntity.toStrict or HttpMessage.toStrict which returns a Future of the object with the body data collected into a ByteString. right, but the server may respond with the data in multiple chunks by using streaming, we win - we can process them as soon as parts arrive if you really want to strict it, see above quote it's a good question though, people will be asking this so I'll open a ticket and improve docs about the specific use case