Kafka Streams KTable join Tombstone

Question

The problem i am facing is we have joins and have multiple logical ways to product a tombstone for deleting a record in the KTable.

Is it possible to determine of if a tombstone was a result of ktable join and not not an explicit tombstone?

Answer 1

One way I can think of differentiating the tombstones i.e. one occurring as part of the ktable join and another one sent as an explicit tombstone is to set an extra header attribute in the explicit tombstone message and the consumer can then read those header to determine the source of tombstone.