[AVRO-1067] Include OutputFormat for a specified Avro schema that works with Streaming

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 1.6.3
• Component/s: java
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Ari Pollak
• Created: 19/Apr/12 16:27
• Updated: 19/Apr/12 16:27

Description

Avro currently includes AvroTextOutputFormat, which will only write an Avro file with a bytes schema. It would be nice if there were an OutputFormat that took a JSON string as a value, and a schema defined with -Davro.output.schema=... and wrote an Avro file based on that.

This has been implemented with TypedBytes in a third-party repository already, but I'd imagine it would be trivial to make it work with text: https://github.com/tomslabs/avro-utils/blob/master/src/main/java/com/tomslabs/grid/avro/TextTypedBytesToAvroOutputFormat.java

It would also be nice to just add the functionality into the existing AvroTextOutputFormat by just checking whether avro.output.schema is defined or not, but that could break backwards-compatibility.