Question: Is it possible to override/remove the -value suffix from subject names when using Confluent Schema Registry?

[willianmrs]

Hi Abris team,

I’m running into a problem deserializing Avro data using Abris and Confluent Schema Registry.
Some of my Kafka topics are integrated with external systems, and their schemas are registered in the registry with custom subject names—they do not follow the {topic}-value or {topic}-key convention, and they don’t have the -value suffix at all (e.g., the subject might just be my_custom_schema).

When I try to read these topics using Abris, the deserializer seems to always look for the schema using the {subject}-value naming pattern, so it cannot find or match these custom subjects.
This is blocking us from consuming messages from those topics.

My question is:

Is there any way to configure Abris so that it can fetch and use a schema subject name as-is (without appending -value) during deserialization?

If not, are there any recommended approaches or workarounds for consuming data when the subject naming in Schema Registry does not follow the default pattern?

Unfortunately, I’m unable to change how the schemas are registered on the external system’s side, so I’m looking for a way to make Abris flexible on this point.

Thanks for your help!

[kevinwallimann]

Hi @willianmrs
In Confluent, when providing a subject name (a handle to the schema), there are three strategies or ways to provide it:

• TopicNameStrategy (default setting)
• RecordNameStrategy
• TopicRecordNameStrategy

The -key and -value naming convention is the one used in TopicNameStrategy. In your case, you probably use RecordNameStrategy or TopicRecordNameStrategy
You can read more about this here: https://developer.confluent.io/courses/schema-registry/schema-subjects/

In ABRiS, you can use these three strategies, or alternatively you can provide a schema id.

• RecordNameStrategy

    val abrisConfig = AbrisConfig
      .fromConfluentAvro
      .downloadReaderSchemaByLatestVersion
      .andRecordNameStrategy("myRecord", "myRecordNamespace")
      .usingSchemaRegistry("http://localhost:8081")

• TopicRecordNameStrategy

    val abrisConfig = AbrisConfig
      .fromConfluentAvro
      .downloadReaderSchemaByLatestVersion
      .andTopicRecordNameStrategy("myTopic", "myRecord", "myRecordNamespace")
      .usingSchemaRegistry("http://localhost:8081")

• Reference by id

    val abrisConfig = AbrisConfig
      .fromConfluentAvro
      .downloadReaderSchemaById(42)
      .usingSchemaRegistry("http://localhost:8081")

Please have a look at our examples page: https://github.com/AbsaOSS/ABRiS/blob/master/documentation/confluent-avro-documentation.md