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Introduction: You can find a description of this phase in section Phase 6 (Introduction).

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Note: See also section File Names, File Patterns, Paths, System Constants and Variables.

(1) The Kafka alias. See section Kafka Connections.

(2) The topic to which the message is sent. Note: If the system variable KAFKA_PARTITION of type Integer is defined and has a value >= 0 , this value will be passed as the topic of the partition to be used.

(3) The data type of the message data to be sent. Important note: The data type must always be specified. Make sure that you always use matching types when sending and receiving. If, for example, a message is defined and sent as Byte/String and then read as Integer/Byte, this leads to an error and the message cannot be read. Lobster_data as a consumer is blocked until someone removes this erroneous message from the broker and it does not process any messages from this topic!

(4) The data type of the key of the message. Important note: The data type must always be specified. Make sure that you always use matching types when sending and receiving. If, for example, a message is defined and sent as Byte/String and then read as Integer/Byte, this leads to an error and the message cannot be read. Lobster_data as a consumer is blocked until someone removes this erroneous message from the broker and it does not process any messages from this topic!

(5) The (optional) key of the message.

(6) An optional identifier of a Kafka consumer (in a consumer group) that is passed to a Kafka broker with every request.

(7) Additional producer properties can be defined via the context menu.

Note: If the system variable KAFKA_TOMBSTONE is set to true, a tombstone record is sent (this can be used to prematurely delete records in certain topics).