Engine-related vs record-related SerDes exceptions

[CesuCiso]

Hello,

I am using Apicurio Schema Registry V2.6.8 with my Kafka Streams application.

In the KafkaStreams exception handlers, I am trying to detect when an exception has occurred because the record content is incorrect or because there is a more general engine error that can affect the other records.

Could you tell me if, in the Apicurio SerDes code, when an error originates from a record inconsistency, a SerializationException is always thrown, also meaning that all other exceptions originating from Apicurio are indicative of an engine error?

I currently only use: apicurio-registry-serdes-avro-serde, apicurio-registry-serde-common .

Thank you for your support.
Regards.

[CesuCiso]

For my tests, I enforced manually a String as the record value (with a String Serializer) for a record sent to a topic whose "topic-value" artifact is associated with a complex schema in Apicurio Registry.

The associated Apicurio desererializer threw an "IllegalStateException: artifactID cannot be null".

[CesuCiso]

I did another test by overiding Apicurio Serializer manipulating bytes after the 5th.

public class CorruptingAvroSerializer extends AvroKafkaSerializer {

@Override
public byte[] serialize(String topic, Headers headers, T data) {
    // Appel normal du serializer pour obtenir les bytes corrects
    byte[] realBytes = super.serialize(topic, headers, data);

    // Cloner pour éviter d'impacter le buffer original
    byte[] corruptBytes = realBytes.clone();

    // Corruption volontaire : inverser quelques octets après le framing
    // Magic byte = 0, puis 4 octets de globalId → on corrompt après ça
    for (int i = 5; i < Math.min(corruptBytes.length, 15); i++) {
        corruptBytes[i] = (byte) ~corruptBytes[i];
    }

    return corruptBytes;
}

}

I get the java.io.UncheckedIOException: com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonParseException: Invalid UTF-8 start byte 0x8c

[EricWittmann]

It seems like we have some work to do if we want consistent and useful exceptions to be thrown in the SerDe layer. Can you open a new GitHub issue for this topic? We can start to enumerate some use cases and what exceptions should result.

Sorry for the late response - this one fell down my todo list accidentally. 👎