Simple caching interceptor (aspect) for Castle Windsor
I needed to cache value from method. Simple. I know there’s at least dozen of ready-made solutions, but I eventually decided to write my own interceptor, because the whole project is already using Castle Windsor and it seemed like a fun stuff to explore. There isn’t really anything special about this code and I originally didn’t want to blog about it, but people on Twitter changed my mind.
Attribute
First, I wrote an attribute I will use to mark methods where the caching is active so I don’t have to hardcode that into the interceptor. There’s optional property to specify how long the value should be cached.
[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, Inherited = false, AllowMultiple = false)]
public sealed class CachedAttribute : Attribute
{
public int Minutes { get; set; }
}
Aspect
The interceptor, or aspect as I think about it, needs to somehow create a key to get or store the return value. I simply use type name, method name and all arguments (converted to string) glued together with some separators. It’s not absolutely bulletproof, but it’s good enough and I know I can always refactor methods to fit this. Surely easier than trying to have perfect key generation story.
Once I have the key, I look up the cache value and either set ReturnValue, never calling Proceed hence never really executing the or Proceeding (See what I did? 😉) as usual and then storing the return value into the cache.
public sealed class CachingAspect : IInterceptor
{
sealed class Item
{
public object Value { get; }
public Item(object value)
{
Value = value;
}
}
public void Intercept(IInvocation invocation)
{
var cacheAttribute = invocation.MethodInvocationTarget.GetAttribute<CachedAttribute>();
if (cacheAttribute == null)
{
invocation.Proceed();
return;
}
var typeName = invocation.TargetType.FullName;
var methodName = invocation.Method.Name;
var arguments = string.Join("|", invocation.Arguments);
var cacheKey = string.Join("_", typeName, methodName, arguments);
if (MemoryCache.Default.Get(cacheKey) is Item cache)
{
invocation.ReturnValue = cache.Value;
}
else
{
invocation.Proceed();
MemoryCache.Default.Add(cacheKey, new Item(invocation.ReturnValue), ComputeExpiration(cacheAttribute));
}
}
static DateTimeOffset ComputeExpiration(CachedAttribute cacheAttribute)
{
var minutes = cacheAttribute.Minutes;
if (minutes < 1)
{
minutes = 5;
}
return DateTimeOffset.UtcNow.Add(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(minutes));
}
}
The caching itself is done by using MemoryCache and storing the Item class (for some reason I don’t use CacheItem, but I don’t remember why; all I recall is I had some trouble using it).
Possible future work
That’s really it. Nothing fancy and it just works. But there’s stuff one could add to make it nicer. Some of my mental notes are dumped below.
- Handle multithreading? Locking?
- Exceptions caching?
- Injectable cache implementation.
- Better cache keys.
