HI Florian Yes I agree to all your thoughts, but my idea was that the case where the object changes but the path keeps stable is one that may more weird than some of the others you mention. As those are not opencmis specific I am not sure if we should promote some of your thoughts to the OASI TC...? In addition the change token is also opaque to the client and maintained by the servers. This means that the client cannot make any assumption about its meaning. My thought was that if we reduce this just to check for equality might help in some cases.
But some of your thoughts go beyond the "path is no stable id" problem and are inherent with caching in general. What is if I get an object by id, cache it and the ACL changes so that I do not have access any longer? There is some risk that a property has changed. What happens if the object gets deleted in the server? We really need to carefully document the behavior of our client lib here at least. One pragmatic solution would be to cache every object with a timestamp when it got cached. If the object is accessed from the cache we might set a (configurable) timeout. If the timeout is exceeded we always refresh the object from the server. This would give at least some guarantee that a stale object will only live for a certain period of time (lets say 30mins or so). For highly sensitive scenarios this timeout might be reduced or set to zero. The timestamp should be associated with the key (e.g. path) and not the value of the cache (object). I fear there won't be a perfect solution as you already said... Jens -----Original Message----- From: Florian Müller [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Dienstag, 16. November 2010 11:40 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: getObjectByPath cache problem The change token can only be used to detect changes within an object. The problem here is that we are potentially dealing with two objects. The root of the problem is that a path is not a stable key for an object. An object can be updated in the repository without our knowledge. The cache would then return an outdated object and everybody should be prepared for that. refresh() reloads the current state from the repository. That works fine if the object is retrieved through getObject(). You can move the object around, unfile it, put it in multiple folders and it still works. The object id is unambiguous. The cache currently maps object paths to object ids. When you call getObjectByPath() it will look up the id for this path and gets the object from the cache. If you move the object to a different folder, getObjectByPath() shouldn't find it anymore. The path of the object has changed and the old path is now invalid. Note that the object hasn't changed and therefore the change token hasn't either. Since there is no notification from the repository, the path-to-id mapping can't be corrected. The cache still thinks the object is accessible through this path. So getObjectByPath() returns the object although it should throw a CmisObjectNotFound exception. Let's assume we create a new object in the place where the old object was. The new object can now be accessed with the old path. Since the outdated path-to-id mapping is still in place, getObjectByPath() returns the old object and not the new one -- which clearly wrong. The problem that we are facing here is that there is no reliable way to keep the path-to-id mapping up-to-date. If we want to be correct, we would have to ask the repository for the current id for the given path every time getObjectByPath() is called (3) -- or not use the cache at all (2). - Florian On 16/11/2010 08:23, Jens Hübel wrote: > Shouldn't the change token solve that? How do we deal with the change token > for other objects that are in the local cache? Ignore? Check on each access? > Configurable? > > Jens > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Florian Müller [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Montag, 15. November 2010 21:17 > To: [email protected] > Subject: getObjectByPath cache problem > > Hi all, > > I had another look at [1]. Unfortunately, it's an unsolvable problem. > I can think of three ways to cope with it: > > 1. We leave it like it is, although it is very, very confusing when you run > into this situation. > > 2. We don't cache by path. How would that affect applications? > > 3. When getObjectByPath is called we fetch the object id from the repository > and then get the object from the cache. > In the worst case, we would have to hit the repository twice. > > > Any opinions? > > - Florian > > > [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CMIS-260
