Provide a setting in consumer configuration to specify where to start consuming messages

Consumer provides a seek api for applications to seek to earliest or latest to consume messages. It would be good to add a setting in consumer configuration to simply application logic. It is useful for application development and any other similar required use cases.

[xiaozongyang]

@sijie Let me try to explain the intention first. We will add a new configuration item which is used by a consumer when subscribing a topic. In detail, we want our consumer program to determine from which place (earlies-the right beginning of message stream or latest-current consuming position) it should begin to consume rather than call the method seek explicitly. Is it the right thing you want? Expecting your reply 😃

[merlimat]

this task is more about adding a configuration setting, so when a consumer start, it would automatically start from earliest, latest or the cursor that current subscription left.

I would expose it in a slightly different angle, such as : “If the subscription does not exist, where do we want to initialize it (either latest or earliest)”

My rationale is that this setting goes with the code, so it’s not going to be practical to change it in different restarts of the same consumer.

For that I would suggest to add an option in ConsumerConfiguration named something like:

// Defaults to MessageId.latest
// only accepts MessageId.earliest
void setInitializeSubscriptionOn(MessageId msgId); 

or an alternative might be just a flag, I don’t know what’s better:

// defaults true, if passed false, means "earliest"
void setIinitializeSubscriptionOnLatest(boolean latest); 

With this, one can set the default behavior in the code and then forget about it.