Process Function's timers "postponing"

Posted by Andrea Spina on
URL: http://deprecated-apache-flink-user-mailing-list-archive.369.s1.nabble.com/Process-Function-s-timers-postponing-tp28401.html

Dear Community,
I am using Flink (processing-time) timers along with a Process Function. What I would like to do is to "postpone" eventually registered timers for the given key: I would like to do it since I might process plenty of events in a row (think about it as a session) so that I will able to trigger the computation "just after" this session somehow stops.

I wondered about deleting eventual existing timers but AFAIU I need to know the previous timer triggering time, which I guess is not possible for me since I use processing-time timers.

I read also [1] but I am not really able to understand if it comes handy to me; for instance, I don't understand what "Since Flink maintains only one timer per key and timestamp...". Does this imply that a new PT timer will automatically overwrite an eventual previously existing one?

Thank you for your precious help,

[1] https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-stable/dev/stream/operators/process_function.html#timer-coalescing

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