Grails Caching and EHCache Caching Controller Plugins, Not Maintenance Methods

Question

Grails Caching and EHCache Caching Controller Plugins, Not Maintenance Methods

I'm having trouble connecting the Grails EHCache module for caching service methods. Here's my setup:

Grails 2.4.2, JDK 1.7

BuildConfig.groovy compile ":cache-ehcache:1.0.4"

Config.groovy defines the next cache named "cache"

grails.cache.config = {
    cache {
        name 'cache'
        timeToLiveSeconds 60
    }
}

The following controller method is cached correctly. I tested by setting a breakpoint in the method and it only hits the first time until the cache expires.

@Cacheable('cache')
def index() {
    render "index-$params.id"
}

I can check the keys in the cache with:

grailsCacheManager.getCache('cache').getNativeCache().getKeys()

and see the value:

localhost:GET:/grails-cache-test/cache/index?id=34

So far so good.

There is the following service method:

@Cacheable('cache')
public method1(id) {
    "method1+$id"
}

Here I am setting a breakpoint and this method is always called regardless of the annotation @Cacheable

. I tried to set the annotation attributes value

and key

manually and there was no change. I am testing calling this method from a non-cached controller method as well as directly from a console plugin. When I get the keys in the service method, I see that there are no keys set.

I've looked at examples in the official documentation, code examples on the internet, github, the book I have, everything looks good, so I'm not sure where the problem is.

Any ideas as to why this service method is not caching the value? Thank!

UPDATE 1

I've been digging into the grails cache-1.1.8 plugin (as well as the associated cache-ehcache-1.0.4) and I think I found something useful. There PageFragmentCachingFilter.doFilter()

are calls to check controller annotations, but nothing to check. It looks like as a result, service annotations are never honored. There is a lot of documentation out there that mentions service methods, so I don't know if there is something elsewhere that handles this, or if this is a less common use case compared to controller methods.

UPDATE 2

It looks like controllers and services are being handled separately. In CacheAspectSupport.execute()

there is a loop for()

that will invoke cachePutRequest.apply(result.get());

, which will actually add the entry to the cache. Unfortunately, once a record is added to a request, it is not immediately available for retrieval. The main put()

code is part of Spring Source, so at this point I'm not sure if it's a Grails plugin issue or a Spring Source issue.