Hello,

I am trying to implement custom record format (other than JSON) for publishing a message to a Kafka topic. Based on my understanding, an external jar needs to be developed that implements pegaserde interface with serialize() method implemented to return the byte stream in the required message format. To develop this external jar, some more JARs are needed. Some of these dependent JARs are already present in Pega (like prpublic.jar, pricu2jdk.jar) while some are not. My questions are -

1) Can the external JAR that is being developed be directly placed in the lib folder? Or does it have to be imported to the Db via Application -> Distribution -> Import wizard?

2) Does this external JAR also needs to bundle the already present Pega JARs (prpublic.jar etc.) or can that be skipped?

3) Do other dependent JARs which are not already in Pega - do these also need to be imported to Db or can we just place these in the lib folder?

4) Is there any difference in Pega's behavior between the other external JARs and the ones that implement pegaserde? I understand the pegaserde JAR has to have the codeset name and version as default.

We are trying to keep the size of the JAR to the minimum and therefore want to understand how to package these external JARs in the most efficient and correct way.

Your support will be highly appreciated!

Best Regards,

Akshit Garg