How to use more information than entries lifespan to control their expiration

[abrahamdia]

I'm using infinispan for caching objects that have dependencies between them (a cached object may reference another cached object). To materialize this relation, I have a counter on each of these objects to count the number of entering references (the cached object has a value and a counter).

I'm enabling cache eviction and expiration however I don't want an object which is referenced by at least another cached object to be removed for expiration (as I've to do some clean-up first).

How I could implement this so that the expiration takes into account these counters in addition to the lifespan?

[rvansa]

You must not use expiration until the entry really can expire. You should probably store the reference counter directly inside the entry (or maybe in the metadata?) and update this using listeners on the other entries. As you don't want to send whole value over network when updating just the reference number part, you can implement DeltaAware interface.