Hello everyone! (Thanks to Tom Bentley for directing me in this direction!)
I have made a series of changes to some of the standard Connect transforms to meet some of the challenges at my company to consume messages using Connect, and have been running them for a few weeks now as custom SMTs. I realized that several of these changes might actually be really good features to be included in the standard transforms so I will open some KIPs to go along with PRs which I already submitted (apologize for going a bit backwards in the process as this was my first time working with the Kafka project). The first one I have created a KIP for is KIP-682 on the TimestampConverter transform. Basically the 2 limitations that I am proposing to remove are the ability to only convert one field at a time, but instead convert multiple fields using a common config, and that if any producer sends a slightly different date/timestamp string format on any message then the transformation fails... so to instead add the ability to support variations in the string input format. More info here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-682%3A+Connect+TimestampConverter+support+for+multiple+fields+and+multiple+input+formats I would appreciate any kind of discussion to make improvements and it would be great to see changes like this being pushed up. Thanks for now! Best regards, Joshua Grisham
