General

The goal of Cleaner module is very trivial -- to provide convenient multi-threaded cleanup for your channels collection.

Cleaner is very similar to Poller in some manner. It uses Observers to fire events notifications, but instead of Approvers it uses Matchers to make a decisions.

In order to make use of Cleaner you create it, add Observers and Matchers you need and start to register channels. In the following sections we will walk through all these steps.

Module structure

Module is located at the package de.nava.informa.utils.cleaner.

  • Cleaner - the main class and central access point to all of Cleaner services.
  • CleanerMatcherIF - interface for Matcher implementations.
  • PollerObserverIF - interface for Observer implementations.

In addition there is additional convenience class provided for transferring changes into Informa persistent storage. PersistenceObserver listens to all events coming from Cleaner and performs consequent changes to underlying storage using manager specified on construction. Note that if you plan to use it instances of channels Cleaner will be dealing with should be produced by Persistence Manager. Otherwise they will not be understood by it and you can get confusing results.

Working with Cleaner

Initialization

There's special rules you need to know to initialize your Cleaner copy. Here's the code for that:

Cleaner cleaner = new Cleaner();

Default period of cleans is set to one hour. You can change it and we will show a bit later how.

Cleaner is capable of doing its work in multiple threads. Doing so it dramatically increases performance. Default value of number of working threads is determined by underlying scheduler. At the moment of this writing the default is set to 5 threads, but it may change, though it's not likely to. In most cases you do not need to deal with such a details, but if you really need full control over that you can specify number of working threads on creation or change it at run-time.

// Here we create a single-threaded Cleaner
Cleaner cleaner = new Cleaner(1);

// Here we change number of threads to 3
cleaner.setWorkerThreads(3);

You should note that change from bigger number of threads down to smaller can take some time. It's not time of the method call itself, but a time of transition. It works this way because the threads requiring to be removed can be busy with processing at the time of change and engine will wait for completion before killing them.

Observers

Observers receive notifications on interesting events:

  • start of cleaning;
  • finish of cleaning;
  • finding of unwanted items.

Another note is that Cleaner is not removing items from the channels for itself. One of your observers should take care of it.

Once you have instance of Cleaner you need to register at least one observer to make it useful. Here's the piece of code:

Cleaner cleaner = new Cleaner();

// Create and register observer
CleanerObserverIF observer = new MyObserver();
cleaner.addObserver(observer);

You may need to remove some observer from the list and you can do it this way:

cleaner.removeObserver(observer);

Matchers

Matchers act as decision-makers. During cleaning each item present in the channel passed to registered Matchers for review. It's enough to have even single vote to decide that item is unwanted and fire necessary event to Observers.

Adding and removing of matchers is also simple:

// Adding new matcher
CleanerMatcherIF matcher = new MyMatcher();
cleaner.addApprover(matcher);

// Removing approver
cleaner.removeMatcher(matcher);

Registering and unregistering channels

The next step after you have created Cleaner instance and set all necessary observers and matchers is to register some channels. When you register channel Cleaner contacts underlying scheduler to create plan of cleans for the channel. The first checking of the channel will start right after that.

// Register channel with default cleaning period
cleaner.registerChannel(channel);

By default, Cleaner uses its global period setting (which is equal to one hour) to initialize channel and build the cleans plan with scheduler, but you may wish to specify your own period for each particular channel.

// Register channel with cleaning period set to 10 minutes
cleaner.registerChannel(channel, 10 * 60 * 1000);

Unregistering of the channel is very straightforward:

// Unregister channel
cleaner.unregisterChannel(channel);

The call of this method guaraties that channel will never be processed again before it is added back. However, if channel was under processing when unregistering was requested the processing of channel will not be stopped for integrity reasons. It should pass full processing cycle in any case.

Cleaning channel immediately

At any time user or your application may decide to clean the channel out of normal clean plan. For this particular case there's a method which instructs scheduler to fire clean event immediately and rebuild entire plan of cleans for this channel taking current moment in time as starting point. Here is the code:

// Trigger immediate cleaning and rebuild updates plan
cleaner.cleanChannel(channel);

Changing global cleaning period setting

By now you already know that Cleaner has its own global cleans period setting. It applies the setting to all new registrations having no custom period defined. It might be necessary to your application to change this setting to fit better its needs. Changing can happen at any time and guaranties intellectual behavior.

The change will reflect in rescheduling of all currently registered channels. Rescheduling doesn't simply resets all of the plans (if it did this way we could end up with immediate cleaning of all registered channels and this is definitely not what we want), but evaluates if time to clean each of the channels has come (channels are older than age specified by new period). If so then the cleaning event will be fired. In any case the plan of channels will be updated with new period setting in mind. Intelligence of this sort ensures that Poller will not overload CPU with massive processing.

Here's the code:

// Set global cleans period to 5 minutes.
cleaner.setPeriod(5 * 60 * 1000);

Things to note

  • You should carefully choose settings for periods. Too often updates may bring overload to CPU.
  • You should remember that if you have several Matchers single positive vote is enough to fire event about that unwanted item found.
  • Cleaner is supposed to be thread-safe. You can count on it.