Proposal: Cache::index()

[henzeb]

I find myself very often needing to store a lot of information in cache, that is related to each other, but stored in one single key may cause the application becoming slow, as it needs to copy all information into memory, even when I just need one single set out of it.

I usually split the data into multiple keys, but I do need to track the the keys. This is apparently a big headache to solve.

We have workarounds for redis, we can do something with tags, but nothing is driver independent and requires an implementation in each project.

Proposal

The proposal is a method that returns an (higher order proxy?) object that automatically registers and deletes keys from a specified index.

// Some usage examples:
Cache::index('myList')->put('akey', 'data');
Cache::index('myList')->forever('akey', 'data');
Cache::index('myList')->delete('akey');

// We could have some helper functions:
Cache::index('myList')->count(); // get count of keys in the index
Cache::index('myList')->move('myOtherList'); // move a key to another index. 
Cache::index('myList')->empty(); // deletes all keys and it's cached items.

Caveats

A Caveat is the TTL. When a key expires, the key will remain in the index, or the index expires and the items still exist, cluttering up your cache. A simple solution would be to have a select set of methods instead that stores information forever.

[henzeb]

for those who cares: https://packagist.org/packages/henzeb/laravel-cache-index

I made it to support every method, while allowing to sync TTL's between items if needed.