Introduction

Caching of web pages is a complicated process: there are many possible policies to choose from, and the right policy can depend on factors such as who is making the request, the URL is being retrieved and resource negotiation settings such as accepted languages and encodings,

Hardcoding caching logic in an application is not desirable, especially for reusable code. It is also not possible to allow an administrator to manually configure the caching headers for every resource in an application. This packages tries to address this problem by providing a cache ruleset framework: it allows implementors to specify a ruleset for every component. Administrators can then define a policy which dictates the correct caching behaviour for each ruleset.

Depending on your environment there are different options for turning the ruleset into HTTP caching headers.

• If you are using Plone 3 and CacheFu you can use five.caching to integrate with CacheSetup.
• If you are using Zope 2.12 or later, you can use plone.caching to integrate with the publisher events and plone.cachepurging if you require support for PURGE requests.
• If you are using Plone 4, you can also use plone.app.caching, which provides UI and default behaviour for plone.caching and plone.cachepurging.
• In a WSGI environment you could set the ruleset in environ or a response header and add a piece of middleware which acts on those hints.

Usage

You can register rulesets using either ZCML or directly in python. If you use ZCML you can use the <cache:ruleset /> directive:

<configure
    xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope"
    xmlns:browser="http://namespaces.zope.org/browser"
    xmlns:cache="http://namespaces.zope.org/cache"/>

  <include package="z3c.caching" file="meta.zcml" />

  <cache:rulesetType
      name="plone.contentTypes"
      title="Plone content types"
      description="Non-folderish content types"
      />

  <cache:ruleset
      for=".frontpage.FrontpageView"
      ruleset="plone.contentTypes"
      />

  <browser:page
      for="..interfaces.IFrontpage"
      class=".frontpage.FrontpageView"
      name="frontpage_view"
      template="templates/frontpage_view.pt"
      permission="zope2.View" />

</configure>

This example sets up a browser view called frontpage_view and associates it with the plone.contentTypes ruleset.

NOTE: Ruleset names should be dotted names. That is, they should consist only of upper or lowercase letters, digits, underscores and/or periods (dots). The idea is that this forms a namespace similar to namespaces created by packages and modules in Python.

You can specify either a class or an interface in the for attribute. As with an adapter registration, a more specific registration can be used to override a more generic one.

Above, we also add some metadata about the type of ruleset using the <cache:rulesetType /> directive. This is principally useful for UI support and can be often be skipped.

If you prefer to use python directly you can do so:

from z3c.caching.registry import register
from frontpage import FrontpageView

register(FrontpageView, "plone.contentTypes")

To find the ruleset for an object use the lookup() method:

from z3c.caching.registry import lookup
cacheRule = lookup(FrontpageView)

To declare the ruleset type metadata, use the declareType method:

from z3c.caching.registry import declareType
declareType = declareType(name="plone.contentTypes", \
                          title=u"Plone content types", \
                          description=u"Non-folderish content types")

If you want to get a list of all declared types, use the enumerateTypes() method:

from z3c.caching.registry import enumerate
for type_ in enumerateTypes():
    ...

The type_ object provides IRulesetType and has attributes for name, title and description.

Strict mode

By default, you are not required to declare the type of a ruleset before using it. This is convenient, but increases the risk of typos or a proliferation of rulesets that are semantically equivalent. If you want to guard against this case, you can put the ruleset into explicit mode, like this:

from z3c.caching.registry import setExplicitMode
setExplicitMode(True)

Information about cacheable resources

This package is intentionally simple, and depends only on a small set of core Zope Toolkit packages. However, real-world caching often requires specific information about published (and potentially cacheable) resources, such as when the underlying resource was last modified, and which URLs to purge if the caching proxy needs to be purged.

z3c.caching aims to be a "safe" and minimalist dependency for packages which want to declare how they can be cached. Hence, whilst the implementation of such things as setting cache control response headers and supporting purging of a caching reverse proxy are left up to other packages, z3c.caching provides a few interfaces which "caching-aware" packages can implement, for higher level frameworks (such as plone.caching and plone.cachepurging) to rely on. This avoids a direct dependency between such packages and those higher level frameworks.

These interfaces are described below. A few helper components are also provided. To configure them, you can include z3c.caching's ZCML configuration:

<include package="z3c.caching" />

Last modified date/time

The ILastModified adapter interface can be used to describe the last modified date of a given published object:

class ILastModified(Interface):
    """An abstraction to help obtain a last-modified date for a published
    resource.

    Should be registered as an unnamed adapter from a published object
    (e.g. a view).
    """

    def __call__():
        """Return the last-modified date, as a Python datetime object.

        The datetime returned must be timezone aware and should normally
        be in the local timezone.

        May return None if the last modified date cannot be determined.
        """

One implementation for this interface is provided by default: When looked up for a Zope browser view, it will delegate to an ILastModified adapter on the view's context. Higher level packages may choose to implement this adapter for other types of publishable resources, and/or different types of view context.

Cache purging

High-traffic sites often put a caching proxy such as Squid or Varnish in front of the web application server to offload the caching of resources. Such proxies can be controlled via response headers (perhaps set via caching operations looked up based on z3c.caching rulesets). Most caching proxies also support so-called PURGE requests, where the web application sends a request directly to the caching proxy asking it to purge (presumably old) copies it may hold of a resource (e.g. because that resource has changed).

This package does not implement any communication with caching proxies. If you need that in a Zope 2 context, consider plone.cachepurging. However, a few components are included to help packages declare their behaviour in relation to a caching proxy that supports purging.

Firstly, z3.caching defines a Purge event, described the interface z3c.caching.interfaces.IPurgeEvent:

class IPurgeEvent(IObjectEvent):
    """Event which can be fired to purge a particular object.

    This event is not fired anywhere in this package. Instead, higher level
    frameworks are expected to fire this event when an object may need to be
    purged.

    It is safe to fire the event multiple times for the same object. A given
    object will only be purged once.
    """

If an object has been changed so that it may need to be purged, you can fire the event, like so:

from z3c.caching.purge import Purge
from zope.event import notify

notify(Purge(context))

A higher level framework such as plone.cachepurging can listen to this event to queue purge requests for the object.

Of course, the most common reason to purge an object's cached representations is that it has been modified or removed. z3c.caching provides event handlers for the standard IObjectModifiedEvent, IObjectMovedEvent and IObjectRemovedEvent events, which re-broadcasts a Purge event for the modified/moved/removed object.

To opt into these event handlers, simply mark your content object with the IPurgeable interface, e.g.:

from z3c.caching.interfaces import IPurgeable

class MyContent(Persistent):
    implements(IPurgeable)

    ...

You can also do this declaratively in ZCML, even for classes not under your control:

<class class=".content.MyContent">
    <implements interface="z3c.caching.interfaces.IPurgeable" />
</class>

These helpers can signal to a framework like plone.cachepurging that the object needs to be purged, but this is not enough to know how to construct the PURGE request. The caching proxy also needs to be told which path or paths to purge. This is the job of the IPurgePaths adapter interface:

class IPurgePaths(Interface):
    """Return paths to send as PURGE requests for a given object.

    The purging hook will look up named adapters from the objects sent to
    the purge queue (usually by an IPurgeEvent being fired) to this interface.
    The name is not significant, but is used to allow multiple implementations
    whilst still permitting per-type overrides. The names should therefore
    normally be unique, prefixed with the dotted name of the package to which
    they belong.
    """

    def getRelativePaths():
        """Return a list of paths that should be purged. The paths should be
        relative to the virtual hosting root, i.e. they should start with a
        '/'.

        These paths will be rewritten to incorporate virtual hosting if
        necessary.
        """

    def getAbsolutePaths():
        """Return a list of paths that should be purged. The paths should be
        relative to the  domain root, i.e. they should start with a '/'.

        These paths will *not* be rewritten to incorporate virtual hosting.
        """

The difference between the "relative" and "absolute" paths only comes into effect if virtual hosting is used. In most cases, you want to implement getRelativePaths() to return a path that is relative to the current virtual hosting root. In Zope 2, you can get this via the absolute_url_path() function on any traversable item. Alternatively, you can look up an IAbsoluteURL adapter and discard the domain portion.

getAbsolutePaths() is mainly useful for paths that are "special" to the caching proxy. For example, you could configure Varnish to purge the entire cache when sending a request to /_purge_all, and then implement getAbsolutePaths() to return an iterable with that string in it.

Here is the default implementation from plone.cachepurging, which purges the default path of an object derived from Zope 2's OFS.Traversable:

class TraversablePurgePaths(object):
    """Default purge for OFS.Traversable-style objects
    """

    implements(IPurgePaths)
    adapts(ITraversable)

    def __init__(self, context):
        self.context = context

    def getRelativePaths(self):
        return [self.context.absolute_url_path()]

    def getAbsolutePaths(self):
        return []

In ZCML, this is registered as:

<adapter factory=".paths.TraversablePurgePaths" name="default" />

The Plone-specific plone.app.caching implements further adapters (with other, unique names) for things like the default view method alias (/view) and downloadable paths for Archetypes image and file fields.