[KAFKA-6684] Support casting values with bytes schema to string

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.1.0
• Component/s: connect
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Amit Sela
• Created: 19/Mar/18 15:54
• Updated: 22/Feb/21 19:35
• Resolved: 01/Oct/18 05:24

Description

Casting from BYTES is not supported, which means that casting LogicalTypes is not supported.

This proposes to allow casting anything to a string, kind of like Java's toString(), such that if the object is actually a LogicalType it can be "serialized" as string instead of bytes+schema.

 

Examples:
BigDecimal will cast to the string representation of the number.
Timestamp will cast to the string representation of the timestamp, or maybe UTC yyyymmddTHH:MM:SS.f format?

 

Worst case, bytes are "casted" to whatever the toString() returns - its up to the user to know the data.

This would help when using a JSON sink, or anything that's not Avro.

Issue Links

• is related to: KAFKA-12170 Connect Cast cannot deal with fields of type "bytes" correctly
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #4820