Spring @CacheEvict using wildcards

Below worked for me on Redis Cache. Suppose you want to delete all Cache entries with key prefix: 'cache-name:object-name:parentKey'. Call method with key value cache-name:object-name:parentKey*.

import org.springframework.data.redis.core.RedisOperations;    
...
private final RedisOperations<Object, Object> redisTemplate;
...    
public void evict(Object key)
{
    redisTemplate.delete(redisTemplate.keys(key));
}

From RedisOperations.java

/**
 * Delete given {@code keys}.
 *
 * @param keys must not be {@literal null}.
 * @return The number of keys that were removed.
 * @see <a href="http://redis.io/commands/del">Redis Documentation: DEL</a>
 */
void delete(Collection<K> keys);

/**
 * Find all keys matching the given {@code pattern}.
 *
 * @param pattern must not be {@literal null}.
 * @return
 * @see <a href="http://redis.io/commands/keys">Redis Documentation: KEYS</a>
 */
Set<K> keys(K pattern);

Answer is: No.

And it is no easy way to achieve what you want.

1. Spring Cache annotations must be simple to be easy to implement by cache provider.
2. Efficient caching must be simple. There is a key and value. If key is found in cache use the value, otherwise compute value and put to cache. Efficient key must have fast and honest equals() and hashcode(). Assume you cached many pairs (key,value) from one tenant. For efficiency different keys should have different hashcode(). And you decide to evict whole tenant. It is no easy to find tenant elements in cache. You have to iterate all cached pairs and discard pairs belonging to the tenant. It is not efficient. It is rather not atomic, so it is complicated and needs some synchronization. Synchronization is not efficient.

Therefore no.

But, if you find a solution tell me, because feature you want is really useful.

As with 99% of every question in the universe, the answer is: it depends. If your cache manager implements something that deals with that, great. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

If you're using SimpleCacheManager, which is a basic in-memory cache manager provided by Spring, you're probably using ConcurrentMapCache that also comes with Spring. Although it's not possible to extend ConcurrentMapCache to deal with wildcards in keys (because the cache store is private and you can't access it), you could just use it as an inspiration for your own implementation.

Below there's a possible implementation (I didn't really test it much other than to check if it's working). This is a plain copy of ConcurrentMapCache with a modification on the evict() method. The difference is that this version of evict() treats the key to see if it's a regex. In that case, it iterates through all the keys in the store and evict the ones that match the regex.

package com.sigraweb.cache;

import java.io.Serializable;
import java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap;
import java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentMap;

import org.springframework.cache.Cache;
import org.springframework.cache.support.SimpleValueWrapper;
import org.springframework.util.Assert;

public class RegexKeyCache implements Cache {
    private static final Object NULL_HOLDER = new NullHolder();

    private final String name;

    private final ConcurrentMap<Object, Object> store;

    private final boolean allowNullValues;

    public RegexKeyCache(String name) {
        this(name, new ConcurrentHashMap<Object, Object>(256), true);
    }

    public RegexKeyCache(String name, boolean allowNullValues) {
        this(name, new ConcurrentHashMap<Object, Object>(256), allowNullValues);
    }

    public RegexKeyCache(String name, ConcurrentMap<Object, Object> store, boolean allowNullValues) {
        Assert.notNull(name, "Name must not be null");
        Assert.notNull(store, "Store must not be null");
        this.name = name;
        this.store = store;
        this.allowNullValues = allowNullValues;
    }

    @Override
    public final String getName() {
        return this.name;
    }

    @Override
    public final ConcurrentMap<Object, Object> getNativeCache() {
        return this.store;
    }

    public final boolean isAllowNullValues() {
        return this.allowNullValues;
    }

    @Override
    public ValueWrapper get(Object key) {
        Object value = this.store.get(key);
        return toWrapper(value);
    }

    @Override
    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    public <T> T get(Object key, Class<T> type) {
        Object value = fromStoreValue(this.store.get(key));
        if (value != null && type != null && !type.isInstance(value)) {
            throw new IllegalStateException("Cached value is not of required type [" + type.getName() + "]: " + value);
        }
        return (T) value;
    }

    @Override
    public void put(Object key, Object value) {
        this.store.put(key, toStoreValue(value));
    }

    @Override
    public ValueWrapper putIfAbsent(Object key, Object value) {
        Object existing = this.store.putIfAbsent(key, value);
        return toWrapper(existing);
    }

    @Override
    public void evict(Object key) {
        this.store.remove(key);
        if (key.toString().startsWith("regex:")) {
            String r = key.toString().replace("regex:", "");
            for (Object k : this.store.keySet()) {
                if (k.toString().matches(r)) {
                    this.store.remove(k);
                }
            }
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void clear() {
        this.store.clear();
    }

    protected Object fromStoreValue(Object storeValue) {
        if (this.allowNullValues && storeValue == NULL_HOLDER) {
            return null;
        }
        return storeValue;
    }

    protected Object toStoreValue(Object userValue) {
        if (this.allowNullValues && userValue == null) {
            return NULL_HOLDER;
        }
        return userValue;
    }

    private ValueWrapper toWrapper(Object value) {
        return (value != null ? new SimpleValueWrapper(fromStoreValue(value)) : null);
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("serial")
    private static class NullHolder implements Serializable {
    }
}

I trust that readers know how to initialize the cache manager with a custom cache implementation. There's lots of documentation out there that shows you how to do that. After your project is properly configured, you can use the annotation normally like so:

@CacheEvict(value = { "cacheName" }, key = "'regex:#tenant'+'.*'")
public myMethod(String tenant){
...
}

Again, this is far from being properly tested, but it gives you a way to do what you want. If you're using another cache manager, you could extends its cache implementation similarly.