Handlers

Handlers are callables that receives the message.

The handler signature should be similar to:

async def my_handler(message, metadata):
    ... code ...
    return True # or False

Where message is the message to be processed and metadata is a dict with metadata information.

The async def is the python coroutine syntax, but regular functions can also be used, but will run in a thread, outside the event loop.

The return value indicates if the handler successfully processed the message or not. By returning True the message will be acknowledged (deleted).

Another way to acknowledge messages inside a handler is to raise DeleteMessage exception.

Any other exception will be redirected to an error_handler, see more Error Handlers.

The default error_handler will log the error and not acknowledge the message.

For some generic handlers that can give you a starting point, take a look at Generic Handlers section.

Class-based handlers

You can also write handlers using classes. The class should implement a handle coroutine/method:

class MyHandler:

    async def handle(self, message, *args):
        ... code ...
        return True

     def stop(self):
        ... clean-up code ...

The method stop is optional and will be called before loafer shutdown it’s execution. Note that stop is not a coroutine.

When configuring your Routes, you can set handler to an instance of MyHandler instead of the handle (the callable) method (but both ways work):

Route(handler=MyHandler(), ...)
# or
Route(handler=MyHandler().handle)

Message dependency

Handlers are supposed to be stateless or have limited dependency on message values. Since the same handler instance object are used to process the incoming messages, we can’t guarantee that an attached value will be kept among several concurrent calls to the same handler.

This might be hard to detect in production and probably is an undesired side-effect:

class Handler:

    async def foo(self):
        # do something with `self.some_value`
        print(self.some_value)
        ... code ...

    async def handle(self, message, *args):
        self.some_value = message['foo']
        await self.foo()
        return True