Akavache Design Guidelines

A set of practices to help maintain sanity when building an application that uses Akavache application distilled from hard lessons learned.

The general rule of thumb with Akavache is to treat it like any other service boundary. Pretend it's like calling a Web API.

Store dumb simple data objects in the cache

Do

// Data Class 
public class RepositoryData
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Owner { get; set; }
}

// When saving data.

var repoViewModel = GetRepository(name);
var repositoryData = new RepositoryData { Name = repoViewModel.Name, Owner = 
repoViewModel.Owner };

IBlobCache cache = GetCache(...);
cache.InsertObject<RepositoryData>(repositoryData);

// When retrieving
var repoData = await cache.GetObjectAsync<RepositoryData>();
var repoViewModel = new RepositoryViewModel { Name = repoData.Name, 
repoData.Owner };

Don't

Store arbitrary objects graphs:

var repoViewModel = GetRepository(name);
IBlobCache cache = GetCache(...);
cache.InsertObject<RepositoryData>(repoViewModel);

// When retrieving
var repoViewModel = await cache.GetObjectAsync<RepositoryViewModel>();

Better

Akavache should have helper methods for doing this:

var repoViewModel = GetRepository(name);
var repositoryData = repoViewModel.ToCacheable<RepositoryData>();

IBlobCache cache = GetCache(...);
cache.InsertObject<RepositoryData>(repositoryData);

// When retrieving
var repoData = await cache.GetObjectAsync<RepositoryData>();
var repoViewModel = new RepositoryViewModel(repoData);
// OR
var repoViewModel = repoData.ToViewModel<IRepositoryViewModel>();