Cache invalidation in Ehcache

Question

I am using Ehcache in Hibernate.

How can I notify the cache that the database has changed? How can I invalidate the cached data? How can I programmatically achieve this?

Answer 1

What do exactly mean? There are 2 ways to make a change in the database: inside the app & outside the app

Inside the app you can trigger easily an invalidation. The second one is a harder to solve. Cache elements are stored with a key and based on that key you can delete it.

CacheManager manager = CacheManager.getInstance();
cache = manager.getCache(cacheName);
cache.remove(key);

or 

cache.removeAll();

Depending how you configured ehcache of course. But you need to know the name of the cache that holds the object.

Answer 2

This is how you can invalidate all EhCache items without bothering what the individual cache names are:

CacheManager manager = CacheManager.getInstance();

String[] names = manager.getCacheNames();

for (String name : names)
{
    Cache cache = manager.getCache(name);

    cache.removeAll();
}