How to wait for several Futures?

Question

Suppose I have several futures and need to wait until either any of them fails or all of them succeed.

For example: Let there are 3 futures: f1, f2, f3.

• If f1 succeeds and f2 fails I do not wait for f3 (and return failure to the client).

• If f2 fails while f1 and f3 are still running I do not wait for them (and return failure)

• If f1 succeeds and then f2 succeeds I continue waiting for f3.

How would you implement it?

Answer 1

You could use a for-comprehension as follows instead:

val fut1 = Future{...}
val fut2 = Future{...}
val fut3 = Future{...}

val aggFut = for{
  f1Result <- fut1
  f2Result <- fut2
  f3Result <- fut3
} yield (f1Result, f2Result, f3Result)

In this example, futures 1, 2 and 3 are kicked off in parallel. Then, in the for comprehension, we wait until the results 1 and then 2 and then 3 are available. If either 1 or 2 fails, we will not wait for 3 anymore. If all 3 succeed, then the aggFut val will hold a tuple with 3 slots, corresponding to the results of the 3 futures.

Now if you need the behavior where you want to stop waiting if say fut2 fails first, things get a little trickier. In the above example, you would have to wait for fut1 to complete before realizing fut2 failed. To solve that, you could try something like this:

  val fut1 = Future{Thread.sleep(3000);1}
  val fut2 = Promise.failed(new RuntimeException("boo")).future
  val fut3 = Future{Thread.sleep(1000);3}

  def processFutures(futures:Map[Int,Future[Int]], values:List[Any], prom:Promise[List[Any]]):Future[List[Any]] = {
    val fut = if (futures.size == 1) futures.head._2
    else Future.firstCompletedOf(futures.values)

    fut onComplete{
      case Success(value) if (futures.size == 1)=> 
        prom.success(value :: values)

      case Success(value) =>
        processFutures(futures - value, value :: values, prom)

      case Failure(ex) => prom.failure(ex)
    }
    prom.future
  }

  val aggFut = processFutures(Map(1 -> fut1, 2 -> fut2, 3 -> fut3), List(), Promise[List[Any]]())
  aggFut onComplete{
    case value => println(value)
  }

Now this works correctly, but the issue comes from knowing which Future to remove from the Map when one has been successfully completed. As long as you have some way to properly correlate a result with the Future that spawned that result, then something like this works. It just recursively keeps removing completed Futures from the Map and then calling Future.firstCompletedOf on the remaining Futures until there are none left, collecting the results along the way. It's not pretty, but if you really need the behavior you are talking about, then this, or something similar could work.