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com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx package
The com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx package provides APIs used
for object serialization. PDX stands for Portable Data eXchange and has the following
advantages over other object serialization APIs:
- The serialized form is portable between Java and C#.
- The data in a PDX serialized object can be accessed without deserializing the object.
This allows data to be accessed even if the domain class is unavailable.
So GemFire servers are able to do things like queries without needing to deserialize
the domain objects. Being able to keep the serialized form in the server cache
saves time and memory.
This also allows a C# developer to only write a C# domain class without needing
to also write a corresponding Java domain class.
- PDX supports class versioning. Different versions of the same PDX class are allowed
in the same distributed system. So you can add a new version of your application
without by just starting a new client. No need to shutdown clients using the
old version of the PDX data or of restarting your servers.
- The PDX serialized form is compact because a minimal amount of type information
is encoded in the serialized form. This saves memory and time.
To use PDX either implement {@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.PdxSerializable}
on your domain class or implement a {@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.PdxSerializer}.
In either case you use a {@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.PdxWriter}
to serialize your data and a
{@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.PdxReader} to deserialize.
An auto serialization mechanism is also provided as an early access feature.
This has the potential to obviate the need for any augmentation of domain
classes to allow them to be serialized. See {@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.ReflectionBasedAutoSerializer}
for more details.
The PDX object model is that a PDX type has a name and an ordered list of PDX fields.
A PDX field has a name and a field type. For your domain class to be serialized
by PDX you must define this meta information. You do this by calling methods on
PdxWriter and PdxReader that define the PDX fields. For example calling
writeString("stringField", this.stringField) defines a field whose name is
"stringField" and whose field type is "String". The PDX type name is the fully
qualified domain class name. PDX field names are case sensitive. They do not need
to match your instance variable names but this is a good convention to follow.
The order in which you write your fields must be the order in which you read them.
As your PDX domain class changes you are free to add and remove fields. But you can
not change the field type of a PDX field. For example you can not change from
calling writeString to writeDate for the same field name.
Once the domain class has changed then some of your fields will not be read during
deserialization. For example if you have a PDX class with one field (lets call it
version 1) and you then add a second field (lets call it version 2) then when
the version 1 code deserializes data from version 2 it will only read field one.
So field two will be unread. But when this object is reserialized it will preserve
the unread field data and include it in the serialized form (unless you configure
ignore-unread-fields to true). You can optimize the amount of memory consumed
by unread fields by managing them yourself by calling
{@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.PdxReader#readUnreadFields}
and {@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.PdxWriter#writeUnreadFields}.
To read the fields of a PDX without deserializing it see
{@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.PdxInstance}.
To modify the fields of a PDX without deserializing it see
{@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.WritablePdxInstance}.
PDX Configuration
The GemFire Cache has a number of configuration attributes related to PDX.
They can be configured using API method on
{@link com.gemstone.gemfire.cache.CacheFactory}
or {@link com.gemstone.gemfire.cache.client.ClientCacheFactory}.
They can also be configured in a cache.xml using the pdx element.
The following describes the dtd elements and attribute names but corresponding
method names are also available on the cache factories.
read-serialized Set it to true if you want PDX deserialization
to produce a PdxInstance instead of an instance of the domain class.
ignore-unread-fields Set it to true if you do not want unread
PDX fields to be preserved during deserialization. This can save you memory
and is safe to use in a member that only reads data from the cache.
persistent Set to true if you are using persistent regions
or WAN gateways. This causes the PDX type information to be written to disk.
disk-store-name If using persistence this attribute allows you
to configure what disk store the PDX type data will be store in. By default
the default disk store is used.
pdx-serializer Allows you to configure the
{@link com.gemstone.gemfire.pdx.PdxSerializer} for this GemFire member.
distributed-system-id When using PDX with WAN gateways each
distributed system must set this gemfire property to a unique value in the
range 0..255 inclusive.