Invalidating Cached Pages From AEM invalidating-cached-pages-from-aem

When using Dispatcher with AEM, the interaction must be configured to ensure effective cache management. Depending on your environment, the configuration can also increase performance.

Setting up AEM User Accounts setting-up-aem-user-accounts

The default admin user account is used to authenticate the replication agents that are installed by default. You should create a dedicated user account for use with replication agents.

For more information see the Configure Replication and Transport Users section of the AEM Security Checklist.

Invalidating Dispatcher Cache from the Authoring Environment invalidating-dispatcher-cache-from-the-authoring-environment

A replication agent on the AEM author instance sends a cache invalidation request to Dispatcher when a page is published. The request causes Dispatcher to eventually refresh the file in the cache as new content is published.

Use the following procedure to configure a replication agent on the AEM author instance for invalidating the Dispatcher cache upon page activation:

Alternatively, you can also access and configure the Dispatcher Flush agent from the AEM Touch UI.

For additional details on how to enable access to vanity URLs, see Enabling Access To Vanity URLs.

There are two potential issues with this approach:

Invalidating Dispatcher Cache from a Publishing Instance invalidating-dispatcher-cache-from-a-publishing-instance

Under certain circumstances performance gains can be made by transferring cache management from the authoring environment to a publishing instance. It will then be the publishing environment (not the AEM authoring environment) that sends a cache invalidation request to Dispatcher when a published page is received.

Such circumstances include:

The dispatcher flush is controlled by a replication agent operating on the publish instance. However, the configuration is made on the authoring environment and then transferred by activating the agent:

After configuring, when you activate a page from author to publish, this agent initiates a standard replication. The log includes messages indicating requests coming from your publish server, similar to the following example:

Manually Invalidating the Dispatcher Cache manually-invalidating-the-dispatcher-cache

To invalidate (or flush) the Dispatcher cache without activating a page, you can issue an HTTP request to the dispatcher. For example, you can create an AEM application that enables administrators or other applications to flush the cache.

The HTTP request causes Dispatcher to delete specific files from the cache. Optionally, the Dispatcher then refreshes the cache with a new copy.

Delete cached files delete-cached-files

Issue an HTTP request that causes Dispatcher to delete files from the cache. Dispatcher caches the files again only when it receives a client request for the page. Deleting cached files in this manner is appropriate for web sites that are not likely to receive simultaneous requests for the same page.

The HTTP request has the following form:

POST /dispatcher/invalidate.cache HTTP/1.1
CQ-Action: Activate
CQ-Handle: path-pattern
Content-Length: 0

Dispatcher flushes (deletes) the cached files and folders that have names that match the value of the CQ-Handler header. For example, a CQ-Handle of /content/geomtrixx-outdoors/en matches the following items:

All other files in the dispatcher cache (or up to a particular level, depending on the /statfileslevel setting) are invalidated by touching the .stat file. This file’s last modification date is compared to the last modification date of a cached document and the document is re-fetched if the .stat file is newer. See Invalidating Files by Folder Level for details.

Invalidation (i.e. touching of .stat files) can be prevented by sending an additional Header CQ-Action-Scope: ResourceOnly. This can be used to flush particular resources without invalidating other parts of the cache, like JSON data that is dynamically created and requires regular flushing independent of the cache (e.g. representing data that is obtained from a third-party system to display news, stock tickers, etc.).

Delete and recache files delete-and-recache-files

Issue an HTTP request that causes Dispatcher to delete cached files, and immediately retrieve and recache the file. Delete and immediately re-cache files when web sites are likely to receive simultaneous client requests for the same page. Immediate recaching ensures that Dispatcher retrieves and caches the page only once, instead of once for each of the simultaneous client requests.

Note: Deleting and recaching files should be performed on the publish instance only. When performed from the author instance, race conditions occur when attempts to recache resources occur before they have been published.

The HTTP request has the following form:

POST /dispatcher/invalidate.cache HTTP/1.1
CQ-Action: Activate
`Content-Type: text/plain
CQ-Handle: path-pattern
Content-Length: numchars in bodypage_path0

page_path1
...
page_pathn

The page paths to immediately recache are listed on separate lines in the message body. The value of CQ-Handle is the path of a page that invalidates the pages to recache. (See the /statfileslevel parameter of the Cache configuration item.) The following example HTTP request message deletes and recaches the /content/geometrixx-outdoors/en.html page:

POST /dispatcher/invalidate.cache HTTP/1.1
CQ-Action: Activate
Content-Type: text/plain
CQ-Handle: /content/geometrixx-outdoors/en/men.html
Content-Length: 36

/content/geometrixx-outdoors/en.html

Example flush servlet example-flush-servlet

The following code implements a servlet that sends an invalidate request to Dispatcher. The servlet receives a request message that contains handle and page parameters. These parameters provide the value of the CQ-Handle header and the path of the page to recache, respectively. The servlet uses the values to construct the HTTP request for Dispatcher.

When the servlet is deployed to the publish instance, the following URL causes Dispatcher to delete the /content/geometrixx-outdoors/en.html page and then cache a new copy.

10.36.79.223:4503/bin/flushcache/html?page=/content/geometrixx-outdoors/en.html&handle=/content/geometrixx-outdoors/en/men.html

package com.adobe.example;

import org.apache.felix.scr.annotations.Component;
import org.apache.felix.scr.annotations.Service;
import org.apache.felix.scr.annotations.Property;

import org.apache.sling.api.SlingHttpServletRequest;
import org.apache.sling.api.SlingHttpServletResponse;
import org.apache.sling.api.servlets.SlingSafeMethodsServlet;

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

import org.apache.commons.httpclient.*;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.PostMethod;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.StringRequestEntity;

@Component(metatype=true)
@Service
public class Flushcache extends SlingSafeMethodsServlet {

 @Property(value="/bin/flushcache")
 static final String SERVLET_PATH="sling.servlet.paths";

 private Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(this.getClass());

 public void doGet(SlingHttpServletRequest request, SlingHttpServletResponse response) {
  try{
      //retrieve the request parameters
      String handle = request.getParameter("handle");
      String page = request.getParameter("page");

      //hard-coding connection properties is a bad practice, but is done here to simplify the example
      String server = "localhost";
      String uri = "/dispatcher/invalidate.cache";

      HttpClient client = new HttpClient();

      PostMethod post = new PostMethod("https://"+host+uri);
      post.setRequestHeader("CQ-Action", "Activate");
      post.setRequestHeader("CQ-Handle",handle);

      StringRequestEntity body = new StringRequestEntity(page,null,null);
      post.setRequestEntity(body);
      post.setRequestHeader("Content-length", String.valueOf(body.getContentLength()));
      client.executeMethod(post);
      post.releaseConnection();
      //log the results
      logger.info("result: " + post.getResponseBodyAsString());
      }
  }catch(Exception e){
      logger.error("Flushcache servlet exception: " + e.getMessage());
  }
 }
}