{"id":14283,"date":"2023-04-11T12:39:02","date_gmt":"2023-04-11T19:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/?p=14283"},"modified":"2025-06-13T20:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T03:19:09","slug":"extending-dotnet-caching-provider-collections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/extending-dotnet-caching-provider-collections\/","title":{"rendered":"Extending .NET Caching Provider for Collections"},"content":{"rendered":"

To help .NET developers better use Couchbase in their applications, there is a collection of community-supported <\/span>Couchbase Extensions<\/span><\/a>. These include extensions for caching, session, multiop, compression, and locking. And there are some officially supported extensions for dependency injection<\/a>, open telemetry, and transactions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The main extension for discussion today is <\/span>Couchbase.Extensions.Caching<\/b>, which implements the <\/span>.NET Distributed Cache interface<\/span><\/a> using Couchbase. This can be added to your project with <\/span>NuGet<\/span><\/a> (<\/span>dotnet add package Couchbase.Extensions.Caching<\/span><\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Recently, I was working with a customer in the cruise industry that is managing several applications, and wants to store caching data separately for each application. However, creating an entirely new bucket for each application is overkill. They were wondering how to specify a scope\/collection when using the Couchbase.Extensions.Caching<\/em> library.<\/span><\/p>\n

Session and Caching Extensions<\/h2>\n

In recent years, the shift from Couchbase SDK 2 to SDK 3 introduced many new features and improvements, including <\/span>scopes\/collections support<\/span><\/a>. The Couchbase.Extensions<\/em> family has also been updated to support SDK 3.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the <\/span>default<\/b> usage of this library uses the <\/span>_default<\/span><\/em> scope and <\/span>_default<\/span><\/em> collection, with no built-in option to specify anything else.<\/span><\/p>\n

To see this in action, here\u2019s the line of configuration to add Couchbase as a distributed cache (taken from the <\/span>GitHub example project<\/span><\/a>):<\/span><\/p>\n

builder.Services.AddDistributedCouchbaseCache(\"myproject\", opt => { });<\/pre>\n
In that code, myproject<\/em>\u00a0is a bucket name. The <\/span>opt<\/span><\/em> object doesn\u2019t have an option for scope\/collection name.<\/span><\/p>\n
Using the sample project, you\u2019ll end up with cached information like this:<\/span><\/p>\n
\"\"<\/p>\n
(Notice the bucket, scope, and collection names are myproject<\/em>, _default<\/em>, and _default<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n
Extending the Extension<\/h2>\n
Thankfully, the library is extensible enough that with a little bit of code, it can be pointed to whatever collection you\u2019d like.<\/span><\/p>\n
Let\u2019s look a little deeper at the project, specifically ICouchbaseCacheCollectionProvider.cs<\/em> and DefaultCouchbaseCacheCollectionProvider.cs<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n