Response Tagging
================

The ``ResponseTagger`` helps you keep track of tags for a response. It can add
the tags as a response header that you can later use to invalidate all cache
entries with that tag.

.. _tags:

Setup
~~~~~

.. note::

    Make sure to :doc:`configure your proxy <proxy-configuration>` for tagging
    first.

The response tagger uses an instance of ``TagHeaderFormatter`` to know the
header name used to mark tags on the content and to format the tags into the
correct header value. This library ships with a
``CommaSeparatedTagHeaderFormatter`` that formats an array of tags into a
comma-separated list. The format for specifying the tags depends on the caching
proxy you use and its configuration. The default settings are made to match and
work out of the box. If you need to change anything, be aware that the caching
proxy is configured separately from your PHP application and the
``ResponseTagger`` - it is up to you to make sure the configurations match.

For example, the :doc:`default configuration of Varnish <varnish-configuration>`
provided in this library uses the header ``X-Cache-Tags`` with a
comma-separated list of tags. If you don't change the ``TagHeaderFormatter`` nor
the header name, just instantiate the response tagger with its default settings::

    use FOS\HttpCache\ResponseTagger;

    $responseTagger = new ResponseTagger();

.. _response_tagger_optional_parameters:

If you need a different behavior, you can provide your own
``TagHeaderFormatter`` instance. Don't forget to also adjust your
:doc:`proxy configuration <proxy-configuration>` to match the response. To use
:ref:`xkey tags <varnish_tagging>`, instantiate the
``CommaSeparatedTagHeaderFormatter`` yourself with the appropriate header and
glue, and pass it to the ``ResponseTagger``::

    use FOS\HttpCache\ResponseTagger;
    use FOS\HttpCache\TagHeaderFormatter;

    $formatter = new CommaSeparatedTagHeaderFormatter('xkey', ' ');
    $responseTagger = new ResponseTagger(['header_formatter' => $formatter]);

The response tagger validates tags that you set. By default, it simply ignores
empty strings and does not add them to the list of tags. You can set the
response tagger to strict mode to have it throw an ``InvalidTagException`` on
empty tags::

    $responseTagger = new ResponseTagger(['strict' => true]);


Working with large numbers of tags
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Depending on how many tags your system usually generates your tags header value
might get pretty long. In that case, again depending on your setup, you might run
into server exceptions because the header value is too big to send. Mostly, this
value seems to be about 4KB. The only thing you can do in such a case is to split
up one header into multiple ones.

 .. note::

    Of course, your proxy then has to support multiple header values otherwise
    you'll end up with a proxy that only reads the first line of your tags.

This library ships with a ``MaxHeaderValueLengthFormatter`` that does
the splitting for you. You give it an inner formatter and the maximum length like so::


    use FOS\HttpCache\TagHeaderFormatter\CommaSeparatedTagHeaderFormatter;
    use FOS\HttpCache\TagHeaderFormatter\MaxHeaderValueLengthFormatter

    $inner = new CommaSeparatedTagHeaderFormatter('X-Cache-Tags', ',');
    $formatter new MaxHeaderValueLengthFormatter($inner, 4096);

.. note::

    Both, Varnish and Symfony HttpCache support multiple cache tag headers.

Usage
~~~~~

With tags you can group related representations so it becomes easier to
invalidate them. You will have to make sure your web application adds the
correct tags on all responses. You can add tags to the response using::

    $responseTagger->addTags(['tag-two', 'group-a']);

Before any content is sent out, you need to send the tag header_::

    header(sprintf('%s: %s',
        $responseTagger->getTagsHeaderName(),
        $responseTagger->getTagsHeaderValue()
    ));
    $responseTagger->clear();

The call to ``clear`` is only relevant if the same PHP process handles multiple
requests. This happens for example when you :doc:`cache on user context <user-context>`
with the Symfony HttpCache.

.. tip::

    If you are using Symfony with the FOSHttpCacheBundle_, the tags
    added to ``ResponseTagger`` are added to the response automatically.
    You also have `additional methods of defining tags`_ with
    annotations and on URL patterns.

Assume you sent four responses:

+------------+-------------------------+
| Response:  | ``X-Cache-Tags`` header:|
+============+=========================+
| ``/one``   | ``tag-one``             |
+------------+-------------------------+
| ``/two``   | ``tag-two, group-a``    |
+------------+-------------------------+
| ``/three`` | ``tag-three, group-a``  |
+------------+-------------------------+
| ``/four``  | ``tag-four, group-b``   |
+------------+-------------------------+

You can now invalidate some URLs using tags::

    $tagHandler->invalidateTags(['group-a', 'tag-four'])->flush();

This will ban all requests having either the tag ``group-a`` /or/ ``tag-four``.
In the above example, this will invalidate ``/two``, ``/three`` and ``/four``.
Only ``/one`` will stay in the cache.

.. note::

    For further reading on tag invalidation see :doc:`cache-invalidator page <cache-invalidator>`.
    For changing the cache header, :doc:`configure your proxy <proxy-clients>`.

.. _header: http://php.net/header
.. _additional methods of defining tags: http://foshttpcachebundle.readthedocs.org/en/latest/features/tagging.html
