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Read Models

As you can see we have annotated this class with @ReadModel. Dewdrop on startup looks to identify ALL the classes that it can find that implement @ReadModel and then keeps track of them. When it finds a ReadModel it will assume that we automatically want to create that ReadModel unless we tell it not to.

If we have a situation where we don’t want a ReadModel to be created and live forever, we can mark the ReadModel as ephemeral which tells Dewdrop to only create this class when we see a query executed for this. Consider it a lazy ReadModel, or a just in time ReadModel. If we want to have an ephemeral ReadModel we can then choose what that means by adding the destroyInMinutesUnused field to our @ReadModel annotation on our class. For example:

@ReadModel(ephemeral = true, destroyInMinutesUnused = ReadModel.DESTROY_IMMEDIATELY)
@Stream(name = "DewdropAccountAggregate", subscribed = true)
@Stream(name = "DewdropUserAggregate", subscribed = false)
public class DewdropAccountDetailsReadModel {
    @DewdropCache
    Map<UUID, DewdropAccountDetails> cache;

    @QueryHandler
    public Result<DewdropAccountDetails> handle(DewdropGetAccountByIdQuery query) {
        DewdropAccountDetails dewdropAccountDetails = cache.get(query.getAccountId());
        if (dewdropAccountDetails != null) { return Result.of(dewdropAccountDetails); }
        return Result.empty();
    }
}

Here we’ve told Dewdrop that we want to create this ReadModel when we see a query executed for this ReadModel. We also told Dewdrop that we want to destroy this ReadModel immediately after it was used. This is a good way to keep your ReadModels from growing too large and eating up memory. However, this would be a bad strategy to use in a stream that has a lot of events associated with. This would become an expensive operation, and would take a long time to load if there were thousands of events. The three states of destroyInMinutesUnused to note are:

  • DESTROY_IMMEDIATELY - This will destroy the ReadModel immediately after it was used.
  • NEVER_DESTROY - This will add the ReadModel to the cache, but it will never be destroyed until restart (just like a non-ephemeral ReadModel).
  • n - Just add a value here for the count of minutes you want it to live on for before destruction.

Destroying a ReadModel after an hour of use is a good idea for situations where you have a UI that is being heavily used by a user and you want to keep the ReadModel alive for snappy performance. However, after that user is done we can then destroy this ReadModel and clear up memory.

Next checkout out how Streams work:

Streams