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I'm trying to express that, at some point in the future, something should have been removed from a collection after a certain event happened.

The exact sentence I used for this is (it's about caching of sessions in a web application):

This is an expired session that should have been removed from the cache after a new session has been saved.

This sounds really wrong to me (not a native speaker), especially the should have been. If I use it like this, it sounds like I want to express that the session won't be saved even though it is supposed to.

Now my question is: Do we use Future II like this? And does it only sound strange to me because I'm not used to it, or because I have misunderstood something completely?

Also, if so, I'd be happy if someone could rephrase this sentence for me, as I also have the feeling that I might have messed up the tenses in it completely anyway.

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    Futur II is the German term for the future perfect: I will have arrived. Is this what you mean? Your example looks more like Konjunktiv II if it were in German.
    – KarlG
    Commented May 28, 2018 at 10:50
  • No, I want to express a passive future perfect. Konjunktiv is exactly what I don't want it to look like, even though I agree, that it does. Which is why I asked the question.
    – Snowfire
    Commented May 28, 2018 at 11:01
  • If all you mean is that the cache will be emptied after a document save, then you can express that in the present or future. I don't understand why you need future perfect. What you have now is an unreal condition: the cache should have been emptied but wasn't.
    – KarlG
    Commented May 28, 2018 at 11:46
  • But that's not all I want to say. It's about the very fact that the session exists at the moment, but SHOULD (if everything goes as planned) at any given point in the future, after a new session has been saved, have been removed by another process.
    – Snowfire
    Commented May 28, 2018 at 13:57
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    I don't understand why you can't say: should be removed from the cache after a new session has been saved. Or should be removed from the cache by the time a new session is saved. Why can't you use plain future rather than future perfect?
    – Peter Shor
    Commented May 28, 2018 at 21:22

1 Answer 1

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The problem with your sentence is the last clause. It should read

"This is an expired session that should have been removed from the cache after a new session was saved."

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