Disabling Caching at Runtime if Couchbase Connection Failed

Posted on by Arpit Aggarwal

In our application we have number of REST API calls out of which some of them are flagged with @Cacheable to cache the response. Cache is backed by Couchbase and whenever application fails to connect Couchbase node then application goes down.

Which is what we are not expecting, we expect data should be served from the source system whenever connection failed, basically bypassing the cache and as soon as the Couchbase node is up or connection established response should be served from cache.

To achieve the same mechanism, I returned “null” whenever connection fails or there is a Cache miss overriding CouchbaseCacheManager, as follows:


import java.util.Map;
import org.springframework.cache.Cache;
import com.couchbase.client.spring.cache.CacheBuilder;
import com.couchbase.client.spring.cache.CouchbaseCacheManager;

public class CouchbaseCustomCacheManager extends CouchbaseCacheManager {

	public CouchbaseCustomCacheManager(final Map<String, CacheBuilder> initialCaches) {
		super(initialCaches);
	}

	@Override
	public Cache getCache(String name) {
		return new CouchbaseCacheWrapper(super.getCache(name));
	}

	protected static class CouchbaseCacheWrapper implements Cache {

		private final Cache delegate;

		public CouchbaseCacheWrapper(Cache couchbaseCache) {
			this.delegate = couchbaseCache;
		}

		@Override
		public String getName() {
			try {
				return delegate.getName();
			} catch (Exception e) {
				return null;
			}
		}

		@Override
		public Object getNativeCache() {
			try {
				return delegate.getNativeCache();
			} catch (Exception e) {
				return null;
			}
		}

		@Override
		public ValueWrapper get(Object key) {
			try {
				return delegate.get(key);
			} catch (Exception e) {
				return null;
			}
		}

		@Override
		public <T> T get(Object key, Class<T> type) {
			try {
				return delegate.get(key, type);
			} catch (Exception e) {
				return null;
			}
		}

		@Override
		public void put(Object key, Object value) {
			try {
				delegate.put(key, value);
			} catch (Exception e) {
				try {
					handleErrors(e);
				} catch (Exception e1) {
				}
			}
		}

		@Override
		public ValueWrapper putIfAbsent(Object key, Object value) {
			try {
				return delegate.putIfAbsent(key, value);
			} catch (Exception e) {
				return null;
			}
		}

		@Override
		public void evict(Object key) {
			try {
				delegate.evict(key);
			} catch (Exception e) {
				try {
					handleErrors(e);
				} catch (Exception e1) {
				}
			}
		}

		@Override
		public void clear() {
			try {
				delegate.clear();
			} catch (Exception e) {
				try {
					handleErrors(e);
				} catch (Exception e1) {
				}
			}
		}

		protected <T> T handleErrors(Exception e) throws Exception {
			if (e instanceof Exception) {
				return null;
			} else {
				throw e;
			}
		}
	}
}

And used it as CacheManager, as follows:

@Bean
public CacheManager cacheManager() {
	final Map<String, CacheBuilder> cache = new HashMap<>();
	for (final String appCache : "127.0.0.1,127.0.0.2,127.0.0.3".split(",")) {
			cache.put(appCache, CacheBuilder.newInstance(CouchbaseCluster
					.create().openBucket("default", "")));
	}
	return new CouchbaseCustomCacheManager(cache);
}

Complete source is available on github.

Fixing com.couchbase.client.java.error.TranscodingException: Could not encode document with ID cache:EMPLOYEE_:1 – Couchbase

Posted on by Arpit Aggarwal

If you are using couchbase spring cache then you might get following exception:


Error occured: Details com.couchbase.client.java.error.TranscodingException: Could not encode document with ID cache:EMPLOYEE_:1

This exception is raised by couchbase client when document is not able to serialized, possible use case is when you are caching the resource which contain nested objects and does not implement Serializable, for example:

Employee.java


public class Employee {

   private int id;
   private String name;
   private Address address;
}

Address.java


 public class Address {
   private String city;
   private String country;
}

If you are facing the same problem as me then you can fix it implementing Serializable in all the classes, as follows:

Employee.java

import java.io.Serializable;

public class Employee implements Serializable {

  private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
  private int id;
  private String name;
  private Address address;
}

Address.java

import java.io.Serializable;

public class Address implements Serializable {

  private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
  private String city;
  private String country;

}

Setting TTL for @Cacheable – Spring

Posted on by Arpit Aggarwal

Today I was asked to set the expiry time of cache for some of the keys our application is using, so I quickly started looking for all of the options provided by Spring @Cacheable notation to set up the expiry time or time to live. Since Spring does not provide any configurable option to achieve it, I build one implementation leveraging @Scheduled annotation with a fixed delay, as follows:


@CacheEvict(allEntries = true, cacheNames = { "EMPLOYEE_", "MANAGER_" })
@Scheduled(fixedDelay = 30000)
public void cacheEvict() {
}

Now the problem is I want cache names as well as the fixed delay time period should be populated from environmental values instead of hard coded values. To achieve the same I declared variables(populated from properties file) at class level and populated the values of the key in the annotation which made IDE to complain that values must be constant, as follows:

“The value for annotation attribute CacheEvict.cacheNames must be a constant expression”

Then I started looking for other options to get the values for the keys from environment and came across fixedDelayString element of @Scheduled notation which helped me to achieve my goal, as follows:


@Scheduled(fixedDelayString = "${couchbase.cache.flush.fixed.delay}")
public void cacheEvict() {
}

Looking for the similar element for @CacheEvict annotation as well, which is unfortunately not available given me a hint after reading the the comment on a bug SPR-10778 which says:

“The cache abstraction supports the CacheResolver abstraction now and it can be specified globally, per class and/or on a specific operation. The CacheResolver give you the ability to compute the caches to use in code so you have all the flexibility that you want.”

As bug says to make use of CacheResolver to dynamically populate the cache names, I used AbstractCacheResolver implementation of it to get the names of cache from environment, as follows:


@Value("#{'${couchbase.cache.flush}'}")
private String couchbaseCacheFlush;

@Bean(name = "customCacheResolver")
	public CacheResolver cacheResolver() {
		CacheResolver cacheResolver = new AbstractCacheResolver(cacheManager()) {
			@Override
			protected Collection<String> getCacheNames(
					CacheOperationInvocationContext<?> context) {
				return Arrays.asList(couchbaseCacheFlush.split(","));
			}
		};
		return cacheResolver;
	}

Modifying the cacheEvict() to use custom cache resolver instead of cache names completed my task for the day, as follows:


@CacheEvict(allEntries = true, cacheResolver = "customCacheResolver")
@Scheduled(fixedDelayString = "${couchbase.cache.flush.fixed.delay}")
public void cacheEvict() {
}

Complete source is available on github.