Jersey HK2 : Dependency injection and healthchecks - dependency-injection

My app has got quite a few of async (cron) processes and they all have their separate binder classes in Jersey. These processes are started and managed through independent scripts.
Now, if I make a change in the classes used by these processes, (e.g. add a dependency in the classes) and forget to update the binder class inadvertently, the processes still start up but fail with org.glassfish.hk2.api.UnsatisfiedDependencyException (which is expected). However, this does not stop the process on the node and monitoring tool still thinks that the process is running fine.
I am looking to implement Healthchecks in these process so that I can see if the process has come up fine after deployment and is able to start without any dependency error. I am exploring following options:
An async lightweight process that exports ServiceLocator health status to a monitoring system (e.g. prometheus)
An API endpoint that can be polled externally and returns response based on ServiceLocator status
I have got a couple of questions:
Is there a native way in Jersey HK2 to do this?
How do I know if Locator is able to resolve all the dependencies (i.e. there is no UnsatisfiedDependencyException)?

In hk2 there is a special service called the ErrorService which you can use to see if there are failures creating services. Since hk2 is a dynamic framework this error service implementation will not get called until someone attempts to create the service that is failing.
You also might want to seriously look into the automatic binding options of hk2. Makes everything so much easier IMO. See the section on Automatic Service Population
Here is an example of using the ErrorService:
#Service
public class ExampleErrorService implements ErrorService {
#Override
public void onFailure(ErrorInformation ei) throws MultiException {
if (ErrorType.SERVICE_CREATION_FAILURE.equals(ei.getErrorType())) {
// Tell your health check service there was an exception
return;
}
// Maybe log other failures?
}
}

Related

Azure Function ServiceBus Trigger Dependency Injection

I have been trying to implement DI for Azure Functions where the functions is triggered by ServiceBus (topics/subscriptions in this case):
[Singleton]
[FunctionName("Alert")]
public static async Task Alert([ServiceBusTrigger(Topic.Alert, Subscription.PowerBi, Connection = "servicebusconnectionstring")] Message message, [Inject]IPowerBiService powerBiService, [Inject]IQueueService queueService)
I have read about Azure Functions and DI on following sites:
https://mcguirev10.com/2018/04/03/service-locator-azure-functions-v2.html
https://blog.wille-zone.de/post/azure-functions-proper-dependency-injection/
https://github.com/introtocomputerscience/azure-function-autofac-dependency-injection
All examples works fins using HTTP trigger, I assume the IIS host is up and running and is containing the services. But using ServiceBus trigger, I can't get it to work. I have implemented the solutions mention above, and a few more but all get same issues. The code works, bu the services are created for message/trigger.
Anyone out there that has manage to do this, or arn't it possible to do?
NOTE (update):
I got some more information that I haven’t got time to verify yet, but I have been using a consumption plan for my Azure Functions. It may be the case that you need an App Service Plan instead (using consumption since that price model is more convenient). If anyone know more about this?
I will look into this later this week.
I just want to confirm that it work’s fine now using an App Service Plan instead of an Consumption Plan. The difference is the "cold start" instead of a "warm" host.
I guess all different once of DI implementations should work fine.
I have been using following : https://github.com/MV10/Azure.FunctionsV2.Service.Locator

What is a Grails "transactional" service?

I'm reading the Grails docs on services which make numerous mention of transactions/transactionality, but without really defining what a transactional service method really is.
Given the nature of services, they frequently require transactional behaviour.
What exactly does this mean? Are transactional methods only those that use JPA/JDBC to communicate with a relational DB, or do they apply to anything covered by JTA?
Is there any reason why I just wouldn't make a service class #Transactional in case it evolves to some day use a transaction? In other words, are there performance concerns to making all service methods transactional?
Grails services are transactional by default - if you don't want a service to be transactional, you need to remove all #Transactional annotations (both Grails' #grails.transaction.Transactional and Spring's #org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional) and add
static transactional = false
If you haven't disabled transactions with the transactional property and have no annotations, the service works the same as if it were annotated with Spring's annotation. That is, at runtime Spring creates a CGLIB proxy of your class and registers an instance of the proxy as the Spring bean, and it delegates to an instance of your actual class to do the database access and your business logic. This lets the proxy intercept all public method calls and start a new transaction, join an existing one, create a new one, etc.
The newer Grails annotation has all of the same settings as the Spring annotation, but it works a bit differently. Instead of triggering the creation of a single proxy, each method is rewritten by an AST transform during compilation, essentially creating a mini proxy for each method (this is obviously a simplification). This is better because the database access and transaction semantics are the same, but if you call one annotated method from another annotated with different settings, the different settings will be respected. But with a proxy, it's a direct call inside the delegate instance, and the proxy is bypassed. Since the proxy has all of the logic to create a new transaction or use other different settings, the two methods will use the first method's settings. With the Grails annotation every method works as expected.
There is a small performance hit involved for transactional methods, and this can accumulate if there are a lot of calls and/or a lot of traffic. Before your code runs, a transaction is started (assuming one isn't active) and to do this, a connection must be retrieved from the pool (DataSource) and configured to turn off autocommit, and make the various transaction settings (isolation, timeout, readonly, etc.) have to be made. But the Grails DataSource is actually a smart wrapper around the "real" one. It doesn't get a real JDBC Connection until you start a query, so all of the configuration settings are cached until then, and then "replayed" on the real connection. If the method doesn't do any database work (either because it never does, or because it exits early based on some condition before the db access code fires), then there's basically no database cost. But if it does, then things work as expected.
Don't rely on this DataSource proxying logic though - it's best to be explicit about which services are transactional and which aren't, and within each service which methods are transactional and which aren't. The best way to do this is by annotating methods as needed, or adding a single annotation at the class level if all methods use the same settings.
You can get more info in this talk I did about transactions in Grails.
First, if your performance concerns are due to the fact your services are transactional then you have reached nirvana. I say this because there are going to be plenty of other bottle necks in your application long before this is a major (or even minor) concern. So, don't fret about that.
Typically in Grails a transaction relates to the transactional state of a database connection or hibernate session. Though it could be anything managed by the JTA with the proper Spring configuration.
In simple terms, it's usually means (by default) a database transaction.

How to peek at message while dependencies are being built?

I building multitenancy into the unit of work for a set of services. I want to keep the tenancy question out of the way of day-to-day business domain work, and I do not want to touch every existing consumer in the system (I am retrofitting the multitenancy onto a system without any prior concept of a tenant).
Most messages in the system will be contexted by a tenant. However, there will be some infrastructure messages which will not be, particularly for the purpose of automating tenant creation. I need a way of determining whether to use a tenant-contexted unit of work, or a infrastructure unit of work uncontexted by a tenant because the way I interact with the database is different depending on whether I have tenant context. The unit of work is built in the process of spinning up the dependencies of the consumer.
As such I need a way of peeking at the message or its metadata before consuming it, and specifically, I need to be able to peek at it during the dependency building. I was intended to have a tag interface to mark tenant management messages out from normal business domain messages, but any form of identifying the difference could work. If I am in a unit of work resulting from an HTTP request, I can look at WebApi's HttpContext.Current and see the headers of the current request, etc. How do I do something analogous to this if I am in a unit of work resulting from messaging?
I see there is a way to intercept messages with BeforeConsumingMessage() but I need a way of correlating it to the current unit of work I am spinning up and I'm not seeing how that would work for me. Pseudocode for what I am trying to do:
if MessageContext.Message.GetType() = typeof<ITenantInfrastructureMessage>:
database = new Database(...)
else:
tenantId = MessageContext.Headers.TenantId;
database = new TenantDatabase(..., tenantId)
I am working in C#/.NET using MassTransit with RabbitMQ and Autofac with MassTransit's built-in support for both.
Your best option is to override at the IConsumerFactory<T> extension point, and extract the tenant from the message (either via a message header, or some message property) and register that in the container child lifetime scope so that subsequent resolutions from the actual consumer class (and it's dependencies) are properly matched to the tenant in the message.
In our systems, we have a TenantContext that is registered in a newly created LifetimeScope (we're using Autofac), after which we resolve the consume from the child scope, and the dependencies that use the tenant context get the proper value since it's registered as part of building the child container for the message scope.
It works extremely well, we even built up extension methods to make it easy for developers registering consumers to specify "tenant context providers" that go from a message type to the proper tenant id, which is used to build the TenantContext.
You can do similar things with activity factories in Courier routing slips (which are a specialization of a consumer).

Grails - restarting Rabbitmq plugin consumers by calling method on plugin class

I am using the Grails Rabbitmq Native plugin. When I launch the application, I don't want the RMQ consumers to be automatically started, so in my Config.groovy I have defined:
rabbitmq.enabled == false
The code within doWithSpring() (https://github.com/budjb/grails-rabbitmq-native/blob/master/RabbitmqNativeGrailsPlugin.groovy#L114) means that certain wiring isn't carried out if this flag is false.
At some point, I want to be able to start the RMQ system up. I'd like to call a method defined within the plugin class, such as restartRabbitContext() (https://github.com/budjb/grails-rabbitmq-native/blob/master/RabbitmqNativeGrailsPlugin.groovy#L231) to start up the RMQ consumers. I think I will need to carry out some of the wiring myself.
Is there a way to do this? What is the import required to be able to access the plugin class's methods?
Your best bet is to use the GrailsPluginManager to access your plugin by name using getGrailsPlugin. From there you should be able to access the plugin as a GrailsPlugin and access the public methods defined in the plugin itself.
The GrailsPluginManager can be obtained though the grailsApplication such as: grailsApplication.pluginManager. In the very rare event you can't use DI you can always fall back to Holders to get to the GrailsPluginManager (though this is a very rare case).

MVC scheduled mail sending

I have got an ASP.NET MVC 4 application, and I want it to send a report e-mail every week. I've read about Quartz.NET, but it's too powerful for this easy task. Now I'm trying to use NCron, but it requires an initialiser in the Main() method (with obligatory parameter args):
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Bootstrap.Init(args, ServiceSetup);
}
}
Is there the way to do this in the Application_Start()? What should I pass as a args param? What other solutions can solve this task?
Author of NCron speaking…
First: I have never myself integrated NCron into a web application, and I am not sure how well it will work. For instance, as Kenneth points out, IIS will shut down your app if it does not receive any traffic, and there might be other hiccups as well.
In order to integrate NCron into a web app, I suggest that you ignore Bootstrap.Init() (designed specifically as an entry point to console apps) and rather work directly with SchedulingService:
using (var service = new SchedulingService())
{
service.Hourly().Run<DataUpdateJob>();
service.Daily().Run<RecycleCacheJob>();
service.Start();
}
Again: I have never done this myself, but please do give it a try, and let me and everyone else know how you fare.
You'll have to look up what ncrone does with those parameters. What this does is pass the command-line arguments of your windows app to the component.
If you're using it on a web app, you don't have command-line args so if it needs arguments, you will have to construct the arguments yourself (either hard-coded or from a config-file or a database or ...)
It's also possible that these are optional, then you can just pass in an empty array (but again, check the docs of ncrone)
Also, keep in mind that when your application shuts down (standard that is after 20 minutes without any activity), your cron runner will not wake it up. If that will be the case you either need to keep the application alive by assuring that at least one request is done every 20 minutes or configure IIS to keep it alive always.

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