Thank you, Dawid. FYI, I've implemented the discarding logic by CoFlatMapFunction, for the special case where there are only two input streams: I maintain a logical state (no match, input1 matched, or input2 matched) and use private variables to store the matched event so far, which waits to be processed along with the event from the other input source.

Chao


On 07/31/2017 02:13 AM, Dawid Wysakowicz wrote:
Ad. 1 Yes it returns and Iterable to support times and oneOrMore patterns(which 
can accept more than one event).

Ad. 2 Some use case for not discarding used events could be e.g. looking for 
some shapes in our data, e.g. W-shapes. In this case one W-shape could start on 
the middle peak of the previous one.

Unfortunately personally I can’t point you to any in-use applications. Maybe 
Kostas, I’ve added to the discussion, know of any.

Anyway, thanks for interest in the CEP library. We will be happy to hear any 
comments and suggestions for future improvements.



On 28 Jul 2017, at 21:54, Chao Wang <chaow...@wustl.edu> wrote:

Hi Dawid,

Thank you.

Ad. 1 I noticed that the method getEventsForPattern() returns an Iterable<T> 
and we need to further invoke .operator().next() to get access to the event value.

Ad. 2 Here is a bit about a use case we have that calls for such discarding 
semantics. In the event processing project I am currently working on, input 
event streams are sensor data, and we join streams and do Kalman filtering, 
FFT, etc. We therefore choose to discard the accepted events once the data they 
carry have been processed; otherwise, it may cause duplicated processing as 
well as incorrect join semantics.

We came up with this question while doing an empirical comparison of Flink and 
our system (implemented with the TAO real-time event service). We implemented 
in our system such semantics, by removing input events once CEP emits the 
corresponding output events.

Could you provide some use cases where the discarding semantics are not needed? 
I guess I am wired into processing sensor data and thus cannot think of a case 
where reusing accepted events would be of interest. Also, could you share some 
pointers to streaming application in-use? We are seeking to make our research 
work more relevant to current practice.

Thank you very much,

Chao

On 07/27/2017 02:17 AM, Dawid Wysakowicz wrote:
Hi Chao,

Ad. 1 You could implement it with IterativeCondition. Sth like this:

Pattern<Event, ?> pattern = Pattern.<Event>begin("first").where(new 
SimpleCondition<Event>() {
    @Override
    public boolean filter(Event value) throws Exception {
       return value.equals("A") || value.equals("B");
    }
}).followedBy("second").where(new IterativeCondition<Event>() {
    @Override
    public boolean filter(Event value, Context<Event> ctx) throws Exception {
       return (value.equals("A") || value.equals("B")) && 
!value.equals(ctx.getEventsForPattern("first"));
    }
}).

Ad. 2 Unfortunately right now as you said Pattern restarts each other event and 
it is not possible to change that strategy. There is ongoing work to introduce 
AfterMatchSkipStrategy[1], but at best it will be merged in 1.4.0. I did not 
give it much thought, but I would try implement some discarding logic.

Regards,
Dawid

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-7169

On 26 Jul 2017, at 22:45, Chao Wang <chaow...@wustl.edu> wrote:

Hi,

I have two questions regarding the use of the Flink CEP library 
(flink-cep_2.11:1.3.1), as follows:

1. I'd like to know how to use the API to express "emit event C in the presence of events A and B, with 
no restriction on the arriving order of A and B"? I've tried by creating two patterns, one for "A 
and then B" and the other for "B and then A", and consequently using two patternStreams to 
handle each case, which emits C. It worked but to me this approach seems redundant.

2. Given the above objective expression, how to consume the accepted events so 
that they will not be used for future matchings? For example, with the arriving 
sequence {A, B, A}, the CEP should only emit one C (due to the matching of 
{A,B}), not two Cs (due to {A,B} and {B,A}). Similarly, with the arriving 
sequence {B, A, B, A}, the CPE should only emit two Cs, not three.


Thanks,

Chao


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