Sorry for the late reply... But what if the remote service that fetches this data was written to return additional data for the single call ( in the example above, I was suggesting that it would return both teach and student data ). In my application this is the case. My custom cache loader impl fetches calls an existing external service call that returns additional data that I wish to define elsewhere in the cache under a separate node. ( Essentially, I am given flattened data and am normalizing it in the cache under separate nodes ) I would not want to make a service call from the cache loader impl that gives me all this data and then discard the 'extra' data until another cache miss (on a differnet fqn/node) for the 'extra' data leads to another invocation of the same service call. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3979674#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...