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Valkey Glide

Command String Arguments

Valkey strings store sequences of bytes, that may include text, serialized objects, or binary arrays. As such, to pass Valkey strings as arguments to commands, or receive Valkey strings in responses, Glide offers two APIs:

  1. String: for common case UTF-8 converted strings keys and String objects can be passed and receives as a Java String.
  2. GlideString: to pass byte[] data, a GlideString container object can be passed as an argument to a command or received as a response from a command.

A rule about the API:

  • Command signatures either take and return String’s or GlideString’s, but not both.
  • String’s are returned if the commands are passed in String’s. e.g CompletableFuture<String[]> mget(String[] keys)
  • GlideStrings’s are returned if the commands are passed in GlideStrings’s. e.g CompletableFuture<GlideString[]> mget(GlideString[] keys)

Arguments for commands that require a String can also be substituted with GlideString in order to pass in or return a binary value.

  • gs() is a static constructor that can be called with a byte[] or String argument to convert to GlideString. For example,
byte[] byteKey = Base64.getDecoder().decode("byteKey");
client.set(gs(byteKey), gs("GlideString value")).get();
  • A GlideString byte[] object can be converted to UTF-8 String by calling .getString() on the GlideString object. For example,
client.get(gs(byteKey)).get();              // "GlideString value" as a GlideString
client.get(gs(byteKey)).get().getString();  // "GlideString value" as a String