Disable spring method caching through external property

Question

I configured spring method caching with ehcache and annotation driven configuration.

I would like however to be able to disable it from a configuration file we use in the application.

My first idea was to call net.sf.ehcache.CacheManager.CacheManager() with no arguments if method caching is disabled. This throws exception:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: loadCaches must not return an empty Collection
at org.springframework.util.Assert.notEmpty(Assert.java:268)
at org.springframework.cache.support.AbstractCacheManager.afterPropertiesSet(AbstractCacheManager.java:49)

My second idea was to configure the net.sf.ehcache.CacheManager.CacheManager() with default data so that the cache is not used (maxElementsInMemory 0 etc.). But then the cache is still used, which is not what I want.

There is a property net.sf.ehcache.disabled but I do not want do disable hibernate caching that also uses ehcache.

Q How can I configure everything to have spring method caching but disable it from my external configuration file? I do not want to modify the application-context nor the code to enable/disable method caching. Only the configuration file we use in the application can be modified.

Answer 1

What I was looking for was NoOpCacheManager:

To make it work I switched from xml bean creation to a factory

I did something as follows:

@Bean
public CacheManager cacheManager() {
    final CacheManager cacheManager;        
    if (this.methodCacheManager != null) {
        final EhCacheCacheManager ehCacheCacheManager = new EhCacheCacheManager();
        ehCacheCacheManager.setCacheManager(this.methodCacheManager);
        cacheManager = ehCacheCacheManager;
    } else {
        cacheManager = new NoOpCacheManager();
    }

    return cacheManager;
}

Answer 2

You can use a spring profile, to enable (or not) the spring caching support

<beans profile="withCache">
   <cache:annotation-driven />
</beans>