How to use Flask-Cache with Flask-Restful

Question

How do I use Flask-Cache @cache.cached() decorator with Flask-Restful? For example, I have a class Foo inherited from Resource, and Foo has get, post, put, and delete methods.

How can I can invalidate cached results after a POST?

@api.resource('/whatever')
class Foo(Resource):
    @cache.cached(timeout=10)
    def get(self):
        return expensive_db_operation()

    def post(self):
        update_db_here()

        ## How do I invalidate the value cached in get()?
        return something_useful()

Answer 1

As Flask-Cache implementation doesn't give you access to the underlying cache object, you'll have to explicitly instantiate a Redis client and use it's keys method (list all cache keys).

• The cache_key method is used to override the default key generation in your cache.cached decorator.
• The clear_cache method will clear only the portion of the cache corresponding to the current resource.

This is a solution that was tested only for Redis and the implementation will probably differ a little when using a different cache engine.

from app import cache # The Flask-Cache object
from config import CACHE_REDIS_HOST, CACHE_REDIS_PORT # The Flask-Cache config
from redis import Redis
from flask import request
import urllib

redis_client = Redis(CACHE_REDIS_HOST, CACHE_REDIS_PORT)

def cache_key():
   args = request.args
   key = request.path + '?' + urllib.urlencode([
     (k, v) for k in sorted(args) for v in sorted(args.getlist(k))
   ])
   return key

@api.resource('/whatever')
class Foo(Resource):

    @cache.cached(timeout=10, key_prefix=cache_key)
    def get(self):
        return expensive_db_operation()

    def post(self):
        update_db_here()
        self.clear_cache()
        return something_useful()

    def clear_cache(self):
        # Note: we have to use the Redis client to delete key by prefix,
        # so we can't use the 'cache' Flask extension for this one.
        key_prefix = request.path
        keys = [key for key in redis_client.keys() if key.startswith(key_prefix)]
        nkeys = len(keys)
        for key in keys:
            redis_client.delete(key)
        if nkeys > 0:
            log.info("Cleared %s cache keys" % nkeys)
            log.info(keys)