This is useful in the reply and timeout callback, if the module wants to
do some cleanup of the blocked client handle that may be stored around
in the module-private data structures.
In some modules it may be useful to have an idea about being near to
OOM. Anyway additionally an explicit call to get the fill ratio will be
added in the future.
This way it is possible to use conditional compilation to be compatible
with a larger amount of Redis versions, however note that this breaks
binary compatibiltiy, so the module must be compiled with the
corresponding redismodule.h file depending on the version of Redis
targeted.
Note that this was an experimental API that can only be enabled with
REIDSMODULE_EXPERIMENTAL_API, so it is subject to change until its
promoted to stable API. Sorry for the breakage, it is trivial to
resolve btw. This change will not be back ported to Redis 4.0.
It was noted by @dvirsky that it is not possible to use string functions
when writing the AOF file. This sometimes is critical since the command
rewriting may need to be built in the context of the AOF callback, and
without access to the context, and the limited types that the AOF
production functions will accept, this can be an issue.
Moreover there are other needs that we can't anticipate regarding the
ability to use Redis Modules APIs using the context in order to build
representations to emit AOF / RDB.
Because of this a new API was added that allows the user to get a
temporary context from the IO context. The context is auto released
if obtained when the RDB / AOF callback returns.
Calling multiple time the function to get the context, always returns
the same one, since it is invalid to have more than a single context.
RedisModule_StringRetain() allows, when automatic memory management is
on, to keep string objects living after the callback returns. Can also
be used in order to use Redis reference counting of objects inside
modules.
The reason why this is useful is that sometimes when implementing new
data types we want to reference RedisModuleString objects inside the
module private data structures, so those string objects must be valid
after the callback returns even if not referenced inside the Redis key
space.