Chapter 1. Using Data Grid as a Spring Cache provider

Add Data Grid dependencies to your application and use Spring Cache annotations to store data in embedded or remote caches.

1.1. Setting up Spring caching with Data Grid

Add the Data Grid dependencies to your Spring application project. If you use remote caches in a Data Grid Server deployment, you should also configure your Hot Rod client properties.

Procedure

  1. Add Data Grid and the Spring integration module to your pom.xml.

    • Remote caches: infinispan-spring5-remote
    • Embedded caches: infinispan-spring5-embedded

      Tip

      Spring Boot users can add the infinispan-spring-boot-starter-embedded instead of the infinispan-spring5-embedded artifact.

  2. Configure your Hot Rod client to connect to your Data Grid Server deployment in the hotrod-client.properties file.

    infinispan.client.hotrod.server_list = 127.0.0.1:11222
    infinispan.client.hotrod.auth_username=admin
    infinispan.client.hotrod.auth_password=changeme

Spring Cache dependencies

Remote caches

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.infinispan</groupId>
        <artifactId>infinispan-spring5-remote</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
        <version>${version.spring}</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Embedded caches

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.infinispan</groupId>
        <artifactId>infinispan-spring5-embedded</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
        <version>${version.spring}</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

1.2. Using Data Grid as a Spring Cache provider

Add the @EnableCaching annotation to one of your configuration classes and then add the @Cacheable and @CacheEvict annotations to use remote or embedded caches.

Prerequisites

  • Add the Data Grid dependencies to your application project.
  • Create the required remote caches and configure Hot Rod client properties if you use a Data Grid Server deployment.

Procedure

  1. Enable cache annotations in your application context in one of the following ways:

    Declarative

    <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns:cache="http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache"
        xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
        xsi:schemaLocation="
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache/spring-cache.xsd">
    
            <cache:annotation-driven />
    
    </beans>

    Programmatic

    @EnableCaching @Configuration
    public class Config {
    }

  2. Annotate methods with @Cacheable to cache return values.

    Tip

    To reference entries in the cache directly, you must include the key attribute.

  3. Annotate methods with @CacheEvict to remove old entries from the cache.

1.3. Spring Cache annotations

The @Cacheable and @CacheEvict annotations add cache capabilities to methods.

@Cacheable
Stores return values in a cache.
@CacheEvict
Controls cache size by removing old entries.

@Cacheable

Taking Book objects as an example, if you want to cache each instance after loading it from a database with a method such as BookDao#findBook(Integer bookId), you could add the @Cacheable annotation as follows:

@Transactional
@Cacheable(value = "books", key = "#bookId")
public Book findBook(Integer bookId) {...}

With the preceding example, when findBook(Integer bookId) returns a Book instance it gets stored in the cache named books.

@CacheEvict

With the @CacheEvict annotation, you can specify if you want to evict the entire books cache or only the entries that match a specific #bookId.

Entire cache eviction

Annotate the deleteAllBookEntries() method with @CacheEvict and add the allEntries parameter as follows:

@Transactional
@CacheEvict (value="books", key = "#bookId", allEntries = true)
public void deleteAllBookEntries() {...}

Entry based eviction

Annotate the deleteBook(Integer bookId) method with @CacheEvict and specify the key associated to the entry as follows:

@Transactional
@CacheEvict (value="books", key = "#bookId")
public void deleteBook(Integer bookId) {...}

1.4. Configuring timeouts for cache operations

The Data Grid Spring Cache provider defaults to blocking behaviour when performing read and write operations. Cache operations are synchronous and do not time out.

If necessary you can configure a maximum time to wait for operations to complete before they time out.

Procedure

  • Configure the following timeout properties in the context XML for your application on either SpringEmbeddedCacheManagerFactoryBean or SpringRemoteCacheManagerFactoryBean.

    For remote caches, you can also add these properties to the hotrod-client.properties file.

PropertyDescription

infinispan.spring.operation.read.timeout

Specifies the time, in milliseconds, to wait for read operations to complete. The default is 0 which means unlimited wait time.

infinispan.spring.operation.write.timeout

Specifies the time, in milliseconds, to wait for write operations to complete. The default is 0 which means unlimited wait time.

The following example shows the timeout properties in the context XML for SpringRemoteCacheManagerFactoryBean:

<bean id="springRemoteCacheManagerConfiguredUsingConfigurationProperties"
      class="org.infinispan.spring.remote.provider.SpringRemoteCacheManagerFactoryBean">
    <property name="configurationProperties">
        <props>
           <prop key="infinispan.spring.operation.read.timeout">500</prop>
           <prop key="infinispan.spring.operation.write.timeout">700</prop>
        </props>
    </property>
</bean>