Program guide > Programming with system APIs and plug-ins



Plug-ins for managing transaction life cycle events

Use the TransactionCallback plug-in to customize versioning and comparison operations of cache objects when you are using the optimistic locking strategy.

You can provide a pluggable optimistic callback object that implements the com.ibm.websphere.objectgrid.plugins.OptimisticCallback interface. For entity maps, a high performance OptimisticCallback plug-in is automatically configured.


Purpose

Use the OptimisticCallback interface to provide optimistic comparison operations for the values of a map. An OptimisticCallback implementation is required when you use the optimistic locking strategy. WebSphere eXtreme Scale provides a default OptimisticCallback implementation. However, usually the application must plug in its own implementation of the OptimisticCallback interface. See Locking strategies for more information.


Default implementation

The eXtreme Scale framework provides a default implementation of the OptimisticCallback interface that is used if the application does not plug in an application-provided OptimisticCallback object, as demonstrated in the previous section. The default implementation always returns the special value of NULL_OPTIMISTIC_VERSION as the version object for the value and never updates the version object. This action makes optimistic comparison a no operation function. In most cases, you do not want the no operation function to occur when you are using the optimistic locking strategy. Your applications must implement the OptimisticCallback interface and plug in their own OptimisticCallback implementations so that the default implementation is not used. However, at least one scenario exists where the default provided OptimisticCallback implementation is useful. Consider the following situation:

How can the loader know how to deal with optimistic versioning without assistance from an OptimisticCallback object? The loader has knowledge of the value class object and knows which field of the value object is used as an optimistic versioning value. For example, suppose the following interface is used for the value object for the employees map:

public interface Employee
{
    // Sequential sequence number used for optimistic versioning.
    public long getSequenceNumber();
    public void setSequenceNumber(long newSequenceNumber);
    // Other get/set methods for other fields of Employee object.
}

In this case, the loader knows that it can use the getSequenceNumber method to get the current version information for an Employee value object. The loader increments the returned value to generate a new version number before updating the persistent storage with the new Employee value. For a Java™ database connectivity (JDBC) loader, the current sequence number in the where clause of an overqualified SQL update statement is used, and it uses the new generated sequence number to set the sequence number column to the new sequence number value.

Another possibility is that the loader makes use of some backend-provided function that automatically updates a hidden column that can be used for optimistic versioning. In some cases, a stored procedure or trigger can possibly be used to help maintain a column that holds versioning information. If the loader is using one of these techniques for maintaining optimistic versioning information, then the application does not need to provide an OptimisticCallback implementation. Use the default OptimisticCallback implementation because the loader is able to handle optimistic versioning without any assistance from an OptimisticCallback object.


Default implementation for entities

Entities are stored in the ObjectGrid using tuple objects. The default OptimisticCallback implementation behaves similarly to the behavior for non-entity maps. However, the version field in the entity is identified using the @Version annotation or the version attribute in the entity descriptor XML file.

The version attribute can be of the following types: int, Integer, short, Short, long, Long or java.sql.Timestamp. An entity should have only one version attribute defined. The version attribute should be set only during construction. After the entity is persisted, the value of the version attribute should not be modified.

If a version attribute is not configured and the optimistic locking strategy is used, then the entire tuple is implicitly versioned using the entire state of the tuple.

In the following example, the Employee entity has a long version attribute named SequenceNumber:

@Entity
public class Employee
{
private long sequence;
    // Sequential sequence number used for optimistic versioning.
    @Version
    public long getSequenceNumber() {
        return sequence;
    }
    public void setSequenceNumber(long newSequenceNumber) {
        this.sequence = newSequenceNumber;
    }
    // Other get/set methods for other fields of Employee object.
}


Write an OptimisticCallback implementation

An OptimisticCallback implementation must implement the OptimisticCallback interface and follow the common ObjectGrid plug-in conventions

The following list provides a description or consideration for each of the methods in the OptimisticCallback interface:


NULL_OPTIMISTIC_VERSION

This special value is returned by getVersionedObjectForValue method if the default OptimisticCallback implementation is used instead of an application-provided OptimisticCallback implementation.


getVersionedObjectForValue method

The getVersionedObjectForValue method might return a copy of the value or it might return an attribute of the value that can be used for versioning purposes. This method is called whenever an object is associated with a transaction. When no Loader is set into a backing map, the backing map uses this value at commit time to perform an optimistic version comparison. The optimistic version comparison is used by the backing map to ensure that the version has not changed since this transaction first accessed the map entry that was modified by this transaction. If another transaction had already modified the version for this map entry, the version comparison fails and the backing map displays an OptimisticCollisionException exception to force rollback of the transaction. If a Loader is plugged in, the backing map does not use the optimistic versioning information. Instead, the Loader is responsible for performing the optimistic versioning comparison and updating the versioning information when necessary. The Loader typically gets the initial versioning object from the LogElement passed to the batchUpdate method on the Loader, which is called when a flush operation occurs or a transaction is committed.

The following code shows the implementation used by the EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl object:

public Object getVersionedObjectForValue(Object value)
{
    if (value == null)
    {
        return null;
    }
    else
    {
        Employee emp = (Employee) value;
        return new Long( emp.getSequenceNumber() );
    }
}

As demonstrated in the previous example, the sequenceNumber attribute is returned in a java.lang.Long object as expected by the Loader, which implies that the same person that wrote the Loader either wrote the EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl implementation or worked closely with the person that implemented the EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl implementation. For example, these people agreed on the value that is returned by the getVersionedObjectForValue method. As previously described, the default OptimisticCallback implementation returns the special value NULL_OPTIMISTIC_VERSION as the version object.


updateVersionedObjectForValue method

The updateVersionedObjectForValue method is called when a transaction has updated a value and a new versioned object is needed. If the getVersionedObjectForValue method returns an attribute of the value, this method typically updates the attribute value with a new version object. If the getVersionedObjectForValue method returns a copy of the value, this method typically would not update. The default OptimisticCallback does not update because the default implementation of the getVersionedObjectForValue method always returns the special value NULL_OPTIMISTIC_VERSION as the version object. The following example shows the implementation used by the EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl object that is used in the OptimisticCallback section:

public void updateVersionedObjectForValue(Object value)
{
    if ( value != null )
    {
        Employee emp = (Employee) value;
        long next = emp.getSequenceNumber() + 1;
        emp.updateSequenceNumber( next );
    }
}

As demonstrated in the previous example, the sequenceNumber attribute is increments by one so that the next time the getVersionedObjectForValue method is called, the java.lang.Long value that is returned has a long value that is the original sequence number value. Plus one, for example, is the next version value for this employee instance. Again, this example implies that the same person that wrote the Loader either wrote EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl implementation or worked closely with the person that implemented the EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl implementation.


serializeVersionedValue method

This method writes the versioned value to the specified stream. Depending on the implementation, the versioned value can be used to identify optimistic update collisions. In some implementations, the versioned value is a copy of the original value. Other implementations might have a sequence number or some other object to indicate the version of the value. Because the actual implementation is unknown, this method is provided to perform the proper serialization. The default implementation calls the writeObject method.


inflateVersionedValue method

This method takes the serialized version of the versioned value and returns the actual versioned value object. Depending on the implementation, the versioned value can be used to identify optimistic update collisions. In some implementations, the versioned value is a copy of the original value. Other implementations might have a sequence number or some other object to indicate the version of the value. Because the actual implementation is unknown, this method is provided to perform the proper deserialization. The default implementation calls the readObject method.


Use an application-provided OptimisticCallback implementation

You have two approaches to add an application-provided OptimisticCallback into the BackingMap configuration: programmatic configuration and XML configuration.


Programmatically plug in an OptimisticCallback implementation

The following example demonstrates how an application can programmatically plug in an OptimisticCallback object for the employee backing map in the grid1 ObjectGrid instance:

import com.ibm.websphere.objectgrid.ObjectGridManagerFactory;
import com.ibm.websphere.objectgrid.ObjectGridManager;
import com.ibm.websphere.objectgrid.ObjectGrid;
import com.ibm.websphere.objectgrid.BackingMap;
ObjectGridManager ogManager = ObjectGridManagerFactory.getObjectGridManager();
ObjectGrid og = ogManager.createObjectGrid( "grid1" );
BackingMap bm = dg.defineMap("employees");
EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl cb = new EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl();
bm.setOptimisticCallback( cb );


XML configuration approach to plug in an OptimisticCallback implementation

The EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl object in the preceding example must implement the OptimisticCallback interface. The application can also use an XML file to plug in its OptimisticCallback object as shown in the following example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<objectGridConfig xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://ibm.com/ws/objectgrid/config ../objectGrid.xsd"
 xmlns="http://ibm.com/ws/objectgrid/config">
<objectGrids>
   
<objectGrid name="grid1">
       
<backingMap name="employees" pluginCollectionRef="employees" lockStrategy="OPTIMISTIC" />
   
</objectGrid>
</objectGrids>

<backingMapPluginCollections>
   
<backingMapPluginCollection id="employees">
       
<bean id="OptimisticCallback" className="com.xyz.EmployeeOptimisticCallbackImpl" />
   
</backingMapPluginCollection>
</backingMapPluginCollections>
</objectGridConfig>


Parent topic:

Program with system APIs and plug-ins


Related concepts

Introduction to plug-ins

Plug-ins for evicting cache objects

Plug-ins for transforming cached objects

Plug-ins for versioning and comparing cache objects

Plug-ins for custom indexing of cache objects

Plug-ins for communicating with persistent stores

Related reference

Plug-ins for providing event listeners


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