spring kafka error handling and retries

Question

Hi We are using Spring kafka 1.3.3 and our app is consume - process - publish pipeline.

How can we handle retry and seek backs if any failure in the pipeline at produce phase. Ex: app is consuming messages, process them and publish into another topic in async fashion. But if there is any error in publishing

1. How can i retry publishing failed message.

2. If the message sending is failed even after retries how can i seek back my consumer to the previous offset ? because by then my consumer position will be some where ahead in the log.

3. How can acknowledge the message in producer call back when the message is successfully produced.

Answer 1

It's easier with newer releases because you have direct access to the Consumer, but with 1.3.x you can implement ConsumerSeekAware - see the documentation. You have to perform the seek on the listener thread because the Consumer is not thread-safe.