Spring Cache and Spring Sessions with Infinispan

Infinispan implements the Spring SPI to offer high-performance, in-memory caching capabilities for Spring applications. You can use Infinispan as a Spring Cache provider and with the Spring Sessions API.

1. Using Infinispan as a Spring Cache provider

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

1.1. Setting up Spring caching with Infinispan

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

Infinispan supports Spring version 5 and version 6. Be aware that Spring 6 requires Java 17.

The examples in this document include artifacts for the latest version of Spring. If you want to use Spring 5 use:

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

Procedure

Add Infinispan and the Spring integration module to your pom.xml.

Remote caches: infinispan-spring6-remote

Embedded caches: infinispan-spring6-embedded

Spring Boot users can add the following artifacts instead of the infinispan-spring6-embedded:

For Spring Boot 3 add infinispan-spring-boot3-starter-embedded
For Spring Boot 2.x add infinispan-spring-boot-starter-embedded

Configure your Hot Rod client to connect to your Infinispan 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-spring6-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-spring6-embedded</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
        <version>${version.spring}</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Additional resources

Configuring Hot Rod Client connections

1.2. Using Infinispan 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 Infinispan dependencies to your application project.
Create the required remote caches and configure Hot Rod client properties if you use a Infinispan Server deployment.

Procedure

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 {
}

Annotate methods with @Cacheable to cache return values.

To reference entries in the cache directly, you must include the key attribute.
Annotate methods with @CacheEvict to remove old entries from the cache.

Additional resources

Spring Framework - Default Key Generation

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 Infinispan 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.

Property Description

Property	Description
`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.

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>

2. Externalizing sessions with Spring Session

Store session data for Spring applications in Infinispan caches and independently of the container.

2.1. Externalizing Sessions with Spring Session

Use the Spring Session API to externalize session data to Infinispan.

Procedure

Add dependencies to your pom.xml.

Embedded caches: infinispan-spring6-embedded

Remote caches: infinispan-spring6-remote

The following example is for remote caches:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.infinispan</groupId>
        <artifactId>infinispan-core</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.infinispan</groupId>
        <artifactId>infinispan-spring6-remote</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
        <version>${version.spring}</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
       <groupId>org.springframework.session</groupId>
       <artifactId>spring-session-core</artifactId>
       <version>${version.spring}</version>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
       <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
       <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
       <version>${version.spring}</version>
   </dependency>
</dependencies>

Specify the appropriate FactoryBean to expose a CacheManager instance.
- Embedded caches: SpringEmbeddedCacheManagerFactoryBean
- Remote caches: SpringRemoteCacheManagerFactoryBean
Enable Spring Session with the appropriate annotation.
- Embedded caches: @EnableInfinispanEmbeddedHttpSession
- Remote caches: @EnableInfinispanRemoteHttpSession
  
  These annotations have optional parameters:
  - maxInactiveIntervalInSeconds sets session expiration time in seconds. The default is 1800.
  - cacheName specifies the name of the cache that stores sessions. The default is sessions.

The following example shows a complete, annotation-based configuration:

@EnableInfinispanEmbeddedHttpSession
@Configuration
public class Config {

   @Bean
   public SpringEmbeddedCacheManagerFactoryBean springCacheManager() {
      return new SpringEmbeddedCacheManagerFactoryBean();
   }

   //An optional configuration bean responsible for replacing the default
   //cookie that obtains configuration.
   //For more information refer to the Spring Session documentation.
   @Bean
   public HttpSessionIdResolver httpSessionIdResolver() {
       return HeaderHttpSessionIdResolver.xAuthToken();
   }
}