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Current state: Under Discussion Merged

Voting thread: here

Discussion thread: here

JIRA:

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Kafka Streams enforces a strict non-null-key policy in the DSL across all key-dependent operations (like aggregations and joins).
For left-joins, it makes sense to still accept a `null`, and add the left-hand record with an empty right-hand-side to the result.
Similarly, for outer-joins it makes sense to keep the record.
The defined semantics for left/outer join are: keep the stream record if no matching join record was found.
Thus, Kstreams Kafka Streams today's behavior is inconsistent with the defined semantics.

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• left join Kstream-Kstream: no longer drop left records with null-key and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right value.
• outer join Kstream-Kstream: no longer drop left/right records with null-key and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right/left value.
• left-foreign-key join Ktable-Ktable: no longer drop left records with null-foreign-key returned by the ForeignKeyExtractor and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right value.
• left join KStream-Ktable: no longer drop left records with null-key and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right value.
• left join KStream-GlobalTable: no longer drop records when KeyValueMapper returns 'null' and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right value.

Repartition of null-key records

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We will hint to the DSL users via Java docs that they have now have the option to distinguish between the following scenarios within a KTable-KTable foreign- key-left-join operator:
"null-key" v.s. "not-null-key but null-value" by passing a 'ValueJoinerWithKey' instead of 'ValueJoiner' to the left join operator.
The remark will be made in the Java docs of all left join methods with a 'ValueJoiner' as a parameter.

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