John Roesler created KAFKA-8455:
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Summary: Add NothingSerde to Serdes
Key: KAFKA-8455
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-8455
Project: Kafka
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: streams
Reporter: John Roesler
Often, when reading an input topic, the key is expected to be null, but there's
actually no way to represent this fact in Consumed, leading to confusing type
signatures down the topology.
For example, you might use the BytesSerde, but then you have a
KStream<Bytes,...>. When maintaining a large application, this becomes a
hazard, since you'd need to "be really careful" not to try and dereference the
key at any point, since you actually know it's always null.
Much better would be to actually represent the fact that the key is null, using
the Void type. One such example of this is the NothingSerde I wrote here:
https://github.com/confluentinc/kafka-streams-examples/blob/5.2.1-post/src/test/java/io/confluent/examples/streams/IntegrationTestUtils.java#L465
After some conversations, I've come to believe this would actually be a useful
addition to the main Serdes collection.
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