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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-3679?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=15224692#comment-15224692
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Jamie Grier commented on FLINK-3679:
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I'm not sure about the locking and operator chaining issues so I would say if
that's unduly complicated because of this change maybe it's not worth it.
However, a DeserializationSchema with more flatMap() like semantics would
certainly the better API given that bad data issues are a reality. It also
seems we could provide this without breaking existing code, but certainly it
would add a bit more complexity to the API (having multiple variants for this).
Anyway, I agree you can work around this issue my making a special "sentinel"
value and dealing with all of this is in a chained flatMap() operator. I
imagine that's exactly the approach that people are already using.
> DeserializationSchema should handle zero or more outputs for every input
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: FLINK-3679
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-3679
> Project: Flink
> Issue Type: Bug
> Components: DataStream API
> Reporter: Jamie Grier
>
> There are a couple of issues with the DeserializationSchema API that I think
> should be improved. This request has come to me via an existing Flink user.
> The main issue is simply that the API assumes that there is a one-to-one
> mapping between input and outputs. In reality there are scenarios where one
> input message (say from Kafka) might actually map to zero or more logical
> elements in the pipeline.
> Particularly important here is the case where you receive a message from a
> source (such as Kafka) and say the raw bytes don't deserialize properly.
> Right now the only recourse is to throw IOException and therefore fail the
> job.
> This is definitely not good since bad data is a reality and failing the job
> is not the right option. If the job fails we'll just end up replaying the
> bad data and the whole thing will start again.
> Instead in this case it would be best if the user could just return the empty
> set.
> The other case is where one input message should logically be multiple output
> messages. This case is probably less important since there are other ways to
> do this but in general it might be good to make the
> DeserializationSchema.deserialize() method return a collection rather than a
> single element.
> Maybe we need to support a DeserializationSchema variant that has semantics
> more like that of FlatMap.
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