Using the KeyAffinityService, how to be able to do cache.get(...) when I dont control the keys?

[jakob.skwarski]

Say I have a class Person

class Person {

     String firstName;

     String lastName;

     String fromCountry;

     //And other fields....

     ...

     ...

}

I want to be able to put objects into a cluster with some key. Normally I would use, for example, firstName+lastName+fromCountry as a key and then from anywhere in the cluster be able to get that Person with just the name and country. Now lets say I use the KeyAffinityService so I get a key by which I will add some Person into some specific node with the key generated by the service. How can I then do cache.get operations? The keys are generated by the service and given a Person object I have, as far as I understand it, no control of how the key is generated so I have no way to make a cache.get(key) operation given that I only know the name and country of some Person. Im quite new to Infinispan and maybe I am missing something basic here....

[mircea.markus]

You'd normally ask the KeyAffinityService (KAF) for a key and then use that (synthetic) key for accessing data (session Ids in clustering web sessions is a classic use case fro KAS).

If you want to encapsulate some semantics in the generated keys, you can pass a KeyGenerator to the KAS service.