The Ultimate UI Tool for Kafka

Plugins

Introduction

Offset Explorer supports custom plugins written in Java. Plugins allow you to view messages that are not natively understood by Offset Explorer, in a format that you see fit. For example, one can write a decorator for Avro (or Thrift) messages that will show the actual contents of the Avro objects in a suitable format.

There is an example of how to write a plugin in the plugins/example folder in your Offset Explorer installation directory.

Developing

You need to create a class that implements the com.offsetexplorer.external.ICustomMessageDecorator2 interface. The interface is located in the 'src' directory of the provided example plugin and it has two methods that you need to implement

Compiling

You must compile your source code using Java 8 compatible compiler.

Packaging

You must put your own compiled classes and any dependencies you might have (e.g. Avro libraries) into a SINGLE jar. Do not include any jars that are already in the 'lib' directory of Offset Explorer, especially any Apache Kafka jars.

Usage

Once you have compiled and packaged your jar, copy it to the 'plugins' folder in the Offset Explorer installation folder. Restart Offset Explorer and navigate to the topic that you want to use the decorator with. In the 'Content Types' drop-downs you should see the name of your decorator. Select it and click on 'Update'. After that, the messages/keys will be decorated using your custom decorator.

UI Tool for Apache Kafka