@CacheEvict should allow multiple key values [SPR-10958]

Ashot Golovenko opened SPR-10958 and commented

Currently you can evict only one or all elements in a single cache region. Allowing something like

@CacheEvict(value = "userCache", key = {"key1", "key2"})

would be really handful.

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Affects: 3.2.4

12 votes, 14 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Kyle Lieber commented

We could really use this functionality as well. I think the suggestions made by @jkuhs would work. Here my scenario if it helps:

We have a Policy and a Product.

I have a Policy which is identified by a policyId and each Policy can have multiple Products which are identified by the policyId and the productCode.

So I have a ProductService with a method for getting a product by policyId and productCode.

public class ProductService {
  @Cacheable("products")
  public Product getProduct(Integer policyId, String productCode) {  }
}

Then I have a PolicyService which has a method for deleting a Policy when given the policyId.

public class PolicyService {
  public void deletePolicy(Integer policyId) {  }
}

The PolicyService#deletePolicy will also delete all products for that policy but I have no way to clear the products cache for that policy.

My workaround options are:

1. Clear all entries in the cache. This is really not an option because this will affect all products for all policies.
2. Do something really ugly like this:

public class ProductService {
  @Cacheable("products")
  public Product getProduct(Integer policyId, String productCode) {  }

  public List<Product> getAllProducts(Integer policyId) { }

  @CacheEvict("products")
  public void evictFromCache(Integer policyId, String productCode) {
    // this method doesn't do anything and is only here for evicting the cache
  }
}

public class PolicyService {
  public void deletePolicy(Integer policyId) {
    // first delete the policy
    doDelete(policyId);
    // then evict the products
    for (Product product : productService.getAllProducts(policyId)) {
      productService.evictFromCache(policyId, product.code);
    }
  }
}

[spring-projects-issues]

Johannes Kuhs commented

For more advanced caching scenarios, some concept of having multiple keys is definitely necessary in my opinion. I’m not sure it needs to be in the form of allowing multiple key values though. The key is used for retrieving a cache entry but really we just need a way to evict specific entries. So instead, it might make more sense to add a new evictKeys parameter. evictKeys simply point to the key and can thus be used to evict the actual entry.

Another use-case for this kind of functionality would be the caching of different product information. A product might have skus, images, prices, features, facets, and other information attached to it that require more expensive operations (e.g. looping through all images to find a certain image type + view, getting a specific customer price, creating a distinct set of facets across skus, etc.). It would be nice to be able to cache the results of these kind of operations and simply evict them based on the product ID when the product is updated.

Updating the existing annotations to support this could look like this:

@Cacheable(value = "productImages", key = "#product.id + #imageType", evictKeys = { "#product.id" })
public Image getProductImageOfType(Product product, String imageType)

@CacheEvict(value = "productImages", evictKeys = { "product.id" })
public void updateProduct(Product product)