Consuming keyed messages with null value

[Warren Henning <wa...@gmail.com>]

I have an application producing Avro-encoded keyed messages (Martin
Kleppmann's new Bottled Water project).

It encodes a delete as a keyed message with an id as a key and a null
payload. I have log compaction turned on.

The Avro console consumer correctly displays this as "null" in my terminal,
but when I try to consume it using the high-level consumer in Java, the
message is never consumed. Subsequent non-null messages that were produced
after that null also aren't consumed.

Do I need to do something in order to have the iterator's hasNext() method
(my code is pretty much exactly what appears in
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Consumer+Group+Example )
not treat a null value as not being a valid message to consume or
something? Or am I misunderstanding what's going on and need to do
something different?

Thanks!