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Migrating the Object Store Connector

Standard Support for Mule 4.1 ended on November 2, 2020, and this version of Mule reached its End of Life on November 2, 2022, when Extended Support ended.

Deployments of new applications to CloudHub that use this version of Mule are no longer allowed. Only in-place updates to applications are permitted.

MuleSoft recommends that you upgrade to the latest version of Mule 4 that is in Standard Support so that your applications run with the latest fixes and security enhancements.

The Object Store Connector in Mule 4 is very similar to the one in Mule 3. The main differences between these major versions are:

  • How custom Object Stores are created: on Mule 4 creation of a Custom Object Store does not require the usage of Spring or the knowledge of the existence of certain java classes.

  • Keys must always be Strings: the Object Store Connector used to accept any Serializable as keys. On Mule 4 all keys must be of type String.

What’s covered in this section:

Namespace Change

On the Mule 3 ObjectStore Connector the namespace used was objectstore . This namespace has change to os on the new Mule 4 Connector.

Mule 3 example
<objectstore:contains config-ref="ObjectStoreConnector" key="#[flowVars.userId]"/>
Mule 4 example
<os:contains key="#[vars.userId]" objectStore="customObjectStore"/>

Using Top Level Objects

You may have noticed in the previous example that the config-ref parameter was removed, and instead an objectStore parameter appears. This is because on Mule 3 most of the connector operations require a Connector Configuration reference, while on Mule 4 most operations will instead receive a reference to an Object Store top level element.

Creating Custom Object Stores

Custom Object Stores are global definitions of an OS that you can reference by name to use it in an operation, allowing you to tweak and configure the Object Store behavior to your needs.

On Mule 3, in order to create a new ObjectStore you needed to create a spring bean and know the specific java classes used for the ObjectStore. On Mule 4 this is much easier, you just have to create a global element that declares the ObjectStore using the os:object-store component.

This are examples of how this was done on Mule 3 and how it is done now on Mule 4 for a simple case where store and retrieve are exposed through HTTP endpoints using persistent custom object stores:

Mule 3 example
<spring:beans>
  <spring:bean id="myCustomObjectStore" class="org.mule.util.store.SimpleMemoryObjectStore"/> (1)
</spring:beans>

<objectstore:config name="ObjectStoreConnector" objectStore-ref="myCustomObjectStore"  partition="users" entryTtl="3600000" expirationInterval="10000" maxEntries="1000" persistent="true"/> (2)
<http:listener-config name="HTTP_Listener_Configuration" host="0.0.0.0" port="8080"/>

<flow name="storeBook">
  <http:listener config-ref="HTTP_Listener_Configuration" path="/store"/>
  <dw:transform-message>
    <dw:set-payload><![CDATA[%dw 1.0 (3)
%output application/java
---
{
	id: inboundProperties.'http.query.params'.id,
	book: inboundProperties.'http.query.params'.book,
	author: inboundProperties.'http.query.params'.author
}]]></dw:set-payload>
  </dw:transform-message>
  <objectstore:store config-ref="ObjectStoreConnector" key="#[payload.id]" value-ref="#[payload]"/> (4)
</flow>

<flow name="retrieveBook">
  <http:listener config-ref="HTTP_Listener_Configuration" path="/retrieve"/>
  <objectstore:retrieve config-ref="ObjectStoreConnector" key="#[message.inboundProperties.'http.query.params'.id]/>
  <json:object-to-json-transformer/>
</flow>

In this snippet a couple of things are to be noted:

1 Creates the custom object store using Spring beans and a reference to a java class.
2 References the custom object store in a configuration.
3 Before using the store operation, a DataWeave transformation is used to set on the payload what is going to be stored.
4 The payload is stored in the object store.

Implementing the same app in Mule 4 would look like this:

Mule 4 example
<http:listener-config name="HTTP_Listener_config">
  <http:listener-connection host="localhost" port="8080" />
</http:listener-config>

<os:object-store name="booksObjectStore" maxEntries="1000" entryTtl="1" entryTtlUnit="HOURS" expirationIntervalUnit="SECONDS" expirationInterval="10"/> (1)

<flow name="storeBook">
  <http:listener config-ref="HTTP_Listener_config" path="/store"/>
  <os:store key="#[attributes.queryParams.id]" objectStore="booksObjectStore" failIfPresent="true"> (2)
    <os:value>
    #[{
      id: attributes.queryParams.id,
      book: attributes.queryParams.book,
      author: attributes.queryParams.author
    }]
    </os:value>
  </os:store>
</flow>

<flow name="retrieveBook">
  <http:listener config-ref="HTTP_Listener_config" path="/retrieve"/>
  <os:retrieve key="#[attributes.queryParams.id]" objectStore="booksObjectStore"/>
  <set-payload value="#[output application/json --- payload]">
</flow>

As you may see, main differences are:

1 A new object store is created without any knowledge of spring beans nor java classes. Note that what is being defined here is no a configuration, but rather an object store top level element.
2 Without the need to store a value on a variable or the payload, an inline expression defines what is going to be stores in the object store.

Note that on Mule 3 you used to have to specify a partition of the Object Store. On Mule 4 you no longer have to specify a partition, instead you just use another Object Store. Also, you can specify the time units for both the entry time to live and the frequency on which you will check if entries have expired or exceed the maximum amount of entries.

Changes to Keys

On Mule 3 the keys used to reference values on an object store could be any Serializable. On Mule 4 only String objects are used for this purpose.

In case that you are using a Serializable that is not a String as keys, you should convert it into String values.

Storing a value

On Mule 4 the value parameter now is taken as a content parameter, this means that it should be defined inline. This was configured as an attribute on Mule 3.

Also, the way to update a value on an object store had a minor change. On Mule 3 you had a flag called overwrite that by default comes as false. On Mule 4 you have a flag called failIfPresent that by default comes as false. This means that now when using the store operation with an already used key, the default behavior is to overwrite the value.

In Mule 4, when the key already exists and the flag failIfPresent is set to true, the error OS:KEY_ALREADY_EXISTS will be thrown.

When migrating pay close attention to how flags are configure, since the default behaviors are different.

Mule 3 example
<http:listener-config name="HTTP_Listener_Configuration" host="0.0.0.0" port="8080"/>
<objectstore:config name="ObjectStoreConnector" partition="users"/>

<flow name="storeClient">
  <http:listener config-ref="HTTP_Listener_Configuration" path="/put"/>
  <dw:transform-message>
    <dw:set-variable variableName="client"><![CDATA[%dw 1.0
      %output application/java
      ---
      {
        id: payload.id,
        name: payload.name,
        lname: payload.lname
      }]]></dw:set-variable>
    </dw:transform-message>
  <objectstore:store config-ref="ObjectStoreConnector" key="#[flowVars.client.id]" value-ref="#[flowVars.client]"/> (1)
</flow>
1 Since on Mule 3 you cannot insert the DataWeave expression inline, your options are to to either save the content on a variable or modify the payload. In this it was assigned to the client variable.
Mule 4 example
<http:listener-config name="HTTP_Listener_config">
  <http:listener-connection host="localhost" port="8080" />
</http:listener-config>

<os:object-store name="Object_store" persistent="false"/>

<flow name="storeClient">
  <http:listener config-ref="HTTP_Listener_config" path="/put"/>
  <os:store key="#[payload.id]" objectStore="Object_store" failIfPresent="true">
    <os:value >#[{ (1)
      id: payload.id,
      name: payload.name,
      lname: payload.lname,
      age: payload.age
    }]</os:value>
  </os:store>
</flow>
1 On Mule 4 you can insert the content to store inline. After this operation the payload remains unchanged.

Default Value to Persistent Attribute

On Mule 4 object stores are persistent by default, while on the Mule 3 connector they are stored on-memory by default. Because of this you will have to be carefull when migrating your implementation. Not saying explicitly the persistence of the object store will mean different things.

This example shows how after migrating, the persistent attribute had to be explicitly added:

Mule 3 example
<objectstore:config name="ObjectStoreConnector" partition="users"/>
Mule 4 example
<os:object-store name="customObjectStore" persistent="false"/>

Cleaning an Object Store

The dispose operation on Mule 3 was used to clear a specific partition of an object store. On Mule 4 we have the clear operation that clears a whole object store. There is no notion of partition anymore.

Mule 3 example
<objectstore:dispose-store config-ref="ObjectStoreConnector" partitionName="users"/>
Mule 4 example
<os:clear objectStore="customObjectStore"/>
On Mule 4 the clear operation will clear the whole Object Store.

Removal of the Dual Store Operation

The Mule 3 Object Store Connector had an operation dual-store that stored a value using key and also stored the same key using value. As key is restricted to be a String, on Mule 4 this operation would not make sense, so it was removed.

Remove Operation Behavior

On Mule 3 the remove operation had a flag named ignoreNotExists which defaults to false that indicated whether the operation should fail if the key that was going to be removed did not exist. On Mule 4 if the key does not exist, the error OS:KEY_NOT_FOUND will be thrown and the you can handle it however you want on the error handling.