get start and end time stamp from time window

Posted by Martin Neumann on
URL: http://deprecated-apache-flink-user-mailing-list-archive.369.s1.nabble.com/get-start-and-end-time-stamp-from-time-window-tp6835.html

Hej,

I have a windowed stream and I want to run a (generic) fold function on it. The result should have the start and the end time stamp of the window as fields (so I can relate it to the original data). Is there a simple way to get the timestamps from within the fold function?

I could find the lowest and the highest ts as part of the fold function but that would not be very accurate especially when I the number of events in the window is low. Also, I want to write in a generic way so I can use it even if the data itself does not contain a time stamp field (running on processing time).

I have looked into using a WindowFunction where I would have access to the start and end timestamp. I have not quite figured out how I would implement a fold function using this. Also, from my understanding this approach would require holding the whole window in memory which is not a good option since the window data can get very large.

Is there a better way of doing this

cheers Martin