Add warning when using cache keys that might not work with memcached.

This means testing with local dev caches (not memcache) will warn
developers if they are introducing inadvertent importabilities. There is
also the ability to silence the warning if a dev is not planning to use
memcache and knows what they are doing with their keys.

Thanks to Carl Meyer for the patch. Fixed #6447.

git-svn-id: http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk@13766 bcc190cf-cafb-0310-a4f2-bffc1f526a37

1 files changed, 39 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/docs/topics/cache.txt b/docs/topics/cache.txt
index e5ca526494..5797199411 100644
--- a/docs/topics/cache.txt
+++ b/docs/topics/cache.txt
@@ -641,6 +641,45 @@ nonexistent cache key.::
     However, if the backend doesn't natively provide an increment/decrement
     operation, it will be implemented using a two-step retrieve/update.
 
+Cache key warnings
+------------------
+
+.. versionadded:: 1.3
+
+Memcached, the most commonly-used production cache backend, does not allow
+cache keys longer than 250 characters or containing whitespace or control
+characters, and using such keys will cause an exception. To encourage
+cache-portable code and minimize unpleasant surprises, the other built-in cache
+backends issue a warning (``django.core.cache.backends.base.CacheKeyWarning``)
+if a key is used that would cause an error on memcached.
+
+If you are using a production backend that can accept a wider range of keys (a
+custom backend, or one of the non-memcached built-in backends), and want to use
+this wider range without warnings, you can silence ``CacheKeyWarning`` with
+this code in the ``management`` module of one of your
+:setting:`INSTALLED_APPS`::
+
+     import warnings
+
+     from django.core.cache import CacheKeyWarning
+
+     warnings.simplefilter("ignore", CacheKeyWarning)
+
+If you want to instead provide custom key validation logic for one of the
+built-in backends, you can subclass it, override just the ``validate_key``
+method, and follow the instructions for `using a custom cache backend`_. For
+instance, to do this for the ``locmem`` backend, put this code in a module::
+
+    from django.core.cache.backends.locmem import CacheClass as LocMemCacheClass
+
+    class CacheClass(LocMemCacheClass):
+        def validate_key(self, key):
+            """Custom validation, raising exceptions or warnings as needed."""
+            # ...
+
+...and use the dotted Python path to this module as the scheme portion of your
+:setting:`CACHE_BACKEND`.
+
 Upstream caches
 ===============