Hi Nick, SinkFunction just implements user-defined functions on incoming elements. OutputFormat offers more lifecycle methods. Thus it is a more powerful interface. The OutputFormat originally comes from the batch API, whereas the SinkFunction originates from streaming. Those were more separate code paths in the past. Ultimately, it would make sense to have only the OutputFormat interface but I think we have to keep it to not break the API.
If you need the lifecycle methods in streaming, there is RichSinkFunction, which implements OutputFormat and SinkFunction. In addition, it gives you access to the RuntimeContext. You can pass this directly to the "addSink(sinkFunction)" API method. Cheers, Max On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 7:14 AM, Nick Dimiduk <ndimi...@apache.org> wrote: > Heya, > > Is there a plan to consolidate these two interfaces? They appear to provide > identical functionality, differing only in lifecycle management. I found > myself writing an adaptor so I can consume an OutputFormat where a > SinkFunction is expected; there's not much to it. This seems like code that > Flink should ship. > > Maybe one interface or the other can be deprecated for 1.0 API? > > Thanks, > Nick
