[jira] [Commented] (FLINK-4415) Enhance Trigger Interface with onFire()

["Aljoscha Krettek (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-4415?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=15574827#comment-15574827 ] 

Aljoscha Krettek commented on FLINK-4415:
-----------------------------------------

[~StephanEwen] do you have any thoughts on this? We had some offline discussions about how the method would not be strictly necessary.

CC: [~kkl0u] I made some changes to the description.

> Enhance Trigger Interface with onFire()
> ---------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: FLINK-4415
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-4415
>             Project: Flink
>          Issue Type: Sub-task
>          Components: Streaming
>            Reporter: Aljoscha Krettek
>            Assignee: Kostas Kloudas
>
> Currently, when a {{Trigger}} returns {{PURGE}} (or {{FIRE_AND_PURGE}}) the window state, trigger state and timer state are completely deleted. Some use cases might only want to have the window contents deleted and keep timers/state until the window is purged by the garbage collection timer.
> I propose to add a new method {{onFire()}} to {{Trigger}} that would allow a {{Trigger}} to clean up some state/timers in reaction to a firing. The method is called when a window fires and we emit data. This gives the trigger the chance to reset/cleanup state. The window operator will not purge window state and timers anymore but call {{Trigger.onFire()}} to give it a chance to decide whether to delete state and timers.
> The new method is not necessary in most cases since a trigger could just replicate the code that would go into {{onFire()}} to the other {{on*()}} methods and do the required cleanup if we return {{FIRE}}. However, with the current interface of {{Trigger}} where {{onMerge()}} can return a {{TriggerResult}} this can lead to inconsistencies since a new incoming element might lead to this flow of actions:
>  - element comes in
>  - we merge windows and call {{onMerge()}}
>  - element is added to newly merged window and {{onElement()}} is called
>  - we fire the window if either of the two methods returned {{FIRE}}
> Notice how the state should not be cleaned up in {{onMerge()}}. 
> In this PR https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/2572 I'm changing {{Trigger.onMerge()}} to have {{void}} as return type so this would mean that we don't strictly need the new method. It would just remove some boilerplate and make the intention of trigger code clearer.



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