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Status

Current state: "Under Discussion"

Discussion thread: here

JIRA: here

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

Motivation

The current `Consumer#poll(Duration)` method is designed to block until data is available or the provided poll timeout expires. This implies, that if fetch requests fail the consumer retries them internally and eventually returns an empty set of records. – Thus, from a user point of view, returning an empty set of records can mean that no data is available at broker side or that the broker cannot be reached.

Besides, we sometimes wants to "peek" the records incoming, to do some testing, without affecting the offsets, like the "peek" method provided in many data structures. So, in this "peek" method, we won't increase the position offset in the partition. That means, under the `enable.auto.commit = true` (default setting), the committed offsets won't be incremented, and in the next "poll", the returned data will still include the records returned by `peek`. (of course if user manually commit the offsets, the offsets will be incremented)

So, we should have a `consumer#peek()` to allow consumers to:

1. peek what records existed and no increasing the position offsets.
2. test if there is connection error existed between consumer and broker

Public Interfaces

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.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

• What impact (if any) will there be on existing users?
• If we are changing behavior how will we phase out the older behavior?
• If we need special migration tools, describe them here.
• When will we remove the existing behavior?

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.