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Status

Current state: "Under Discussion"

Discussion thread: here [Change the link from the KIP proposal email archive to your own email thread]

JIRA: KAFKA-15187 

Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

Describe the problems you are trying to solve.

Current partition method only accepts key and value. Wanted to provide support for selecting partition based on headers too. 

Sample use case : 

You have a header which provides priority of the message [lets say 0 to 9]. You have 10 partitions which you want to use for each priority. With headers available in partition method the partition can be chossen based on the header value. 

Public Interfaces

Briefly list any new interfaces that will be introduced as part of this proposal or any existing interfaces that will be removed or changed. The purpose of this section is to concisely call out the public contract that will come along with this feature.

A public interface is any change to the following:

• Binary log format

• The network protocol and api behavior

• Any class in the public packages under clientsConfiguration, especially client configuration

  • org/apache/kafka/common/serialization

  • org/apache/kafka/common

  • org/apache/kafka/common/errors

  • org/apache/kafka/clients/producer

  • org/apache/kafka/clients/consumer (eventually, once stable)

• Monitoring

• Command line tools and arguments

• Anything else that will likely break existing users in some way when they upgrade

Partitioner method in org/apache/kafka/clients/producer will have the following update :

• A new overloaded method partition(String topic, Object key, byte[] keyBytes, Object value, byte[] valueBytes, Cluster cluster, Headers headers) with default implementation to call the existing method.

Proposed Changes

Describe the new thing you want to do in appropriate detail. This may be fairly extensive and have large subsections of its own. Or it may be a few sentences. Use judgement based on the scope of the change.

Add a new overloaded method partition(String topic, Object key, byte[] keyBytes, Object value, byte[] valueBytes, Cluster cluster, Headers headers) with default implementation to call the existing method in the Partitioner method in org/apache/kafka/clients/producer

This lets the users to implement the partitioner with ability to choose partition based on header values.

Make the call to partition method in KafkaProducer to use the new method. Since it is defaulted to use the existing method, this should not cause any behaviour change.

Mark headers as readonly before the first call for

1. Make sure the client cannot update the headers.
2. Ensure consistency as it get marked before the second call.

Total changes : https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/13981

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

• What impact (if any) will there be on existing users?
  • None
• If we are changing behavior how will we phase out the older behavior?
  • NA
• If we need special migration tools, describe them here.
  • NA
• When will we remove the existing behavior?
  • NA

Test Plan

Describe in few sentences how the KIP will be tested. We are mostly interested in system tests (since unit-tests are specific to implementation details). How will we know that the implementation works as expected? How will we know nothing broke?

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Rejected Alternatives

If there are alternative ways of accomplishing the same thing, what were they? The purpose of this section is to motivate why the design is the way it is and not some other way.

1. Currently the functionality is achieved by appending the header value to the key and stripping it off in the keySerializer when creating the keyBytes. This is a hacky solution.