5. Externalized Configuration

Like Spring Boot itself (see here), Spring Boot for Apache Geode and Pivotal GemFire (SBDG) supports externalized configuration.

By externalized configuration, we mean configuration meta-data stored in a Spring Boot application.properties file, for instance. Properties can even be delineated by concern, broken out into individual properties files, that are perhaps only enabled by a specific Profile.

There are many other powerful things you can do, such as use placeholders in properties, encrypt properties, and so on. What we are particularly interested in, in this section, is type-safety.

Like Spring Boot, Spring Boot for Apache Geode/Pivotal GemFire provides a hierarchy of classes used to capture the configuration of several Apache Geode or Pivotal GemFire features in an associated @ConfigurationProperties annotated class. Again, the configuration is specified as well-known, documented properties in 1 or more Spring Boot application.properties files.

For instance, I may have configured my Spring Boot, ClientCache application as follows:

Spring Boot application.properties containing Spring Data properties for Apache Geode / Pivotal GemFire. 

# Spring Boot application.properties used to configure Apache Geode

spring.data.gemfire.name=MySpringBootApacheGeodeApplication

# Configure general cache properties
spring.data.gemfire.cache.copy-on-read=true
spring.data.gemfire.cache.log-level=debug

# Configure ClientCache specific properties
spring.data.gemfire.cache.client.durable-client-id=123
spring.data.gemfire.cache.client.keep-alive=true

# Configure a log file
spring.data.gemfire.logging.log-file=/path/to/geode.log

# Configure the client's connection Pool to the servers in the cluster
spring.data.gemfire.pool.locators=10.105.120.16[11235],boombox[10334]

There are many other properties a user may use to externalize the configuration of their Spring Boot, Apache Geode application. You may refer to the Spring Data for Apache Geode (SDG) configuration annotations Javadoc for specific configuration properties as needed. Specifically, review the "enabling" annotation attributes.

There may be cases where you require access to the configuration meta-data (specified in properties) in your Spring Boot applications themselves, perhaps to further inspect or act on a particular configuration setting.

Of course, you can access any property using Spring’s Environment abstraction, like so:

Using the Spring `Enviornment. 

  boolean copyOnRead = environment.getProperty("spring.data.gemfire.cache.copy-on-read", Boolean.TYPE, false);

While using the Environment is a nice approach, you might need access to additional properties or want to access the property values in a type-safe manner. Therefore, it is now possible, thanks to SBDG’s auto-configured configuration processor, to access the configuration meta-data using provided @ConfigurationProperties classes.

Following on to our example above, I can now do the following:

Using GemFireProperties. 

@Component
class MyApplicationComponent {

  @Autowired
  private GemFireProperties gemfireProperties;

  public void someMethodUsingGemFireProperties() {

    boolean copyOnRead = this.gemfireProperties.getCache().isCopyOnRead();

    // do something with `copyOnRead`
  }

  ...
}

Given a handle to GemFireProperties, you can access any of the configuration properties used to configure either Apache Geode or Pivotal GemFire in a Spring context. You simply only need to autowire an instance of GemFireProperties into your application component.

A complete reference to the SBDG provided @ConfigurationProperties classes and supporting classes is available here.

# Spring Boot application.properties used to configure Apache Geode as a Session state caching provider in Spring Session

spring.session.data.gemfire.session.expiration.max-inactive-interval-seconds=300
spring.session.data.gemfire.session.region.name=UserSessions

@Component
class MyApplicationComponent {

  @Autowired
  private SpringSessionProperties springSessionProperties;

  public void someMethodUsingSpringSessionProperties() {

    String sessionRegionName = this.springSessionProperties.getSession().getRegion().getName();

    // do something with `sessionRegionName`
  }

  ...
}