/*
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
* contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
* this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
* The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
* (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
* the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
package org.apache.flink.streaming.util.serialization;
import java.io.Serializable;
/**
* The serialization schema describes how to turn a data object into a different serialized
* representation. Most data sinks (for example Apache Kafka) require the data to be handed
* to them in a specific format (for example as byte strings).
*
* @param <T> The type to be serialized.
*/
public interface KeyedSerializationSchema<T> extends Serializable {
/**
* Serializes the key of the incoming element to a byte array
* This method might return null if no key is available.
*
* @param element The incoming element to be serialized
* @return the key of the element as a byte array
*/
byte[] serializeKey(T element);
/**
* Serializes the value of the incoming element to a byte array
*
* @param element The incoming element to be serialized
* @return the value of the element as a byte array
*/
byte[] serializeValue(T element);
/**
* Optional method to determine the target topic for the element
*
* @param element Incoming element to determine the target topic from
* @return null or the target topic
*/
String getTargetTopic(T element);
}