How to temporarily resume Spring Kafka listener

Question

I am maintaining a Spring Boot application that uses Spring Kafka for a variety of asynchronous flows. I have implemented functionality that allows for me to dynamically pause and resume any Kafka Listener / consumer of my choosing. However, I would like to be able to resume a listener / consumer in a way such that it only temporarily polls a specified fixed number of Kafka messages (eg 1 or 5) such that I can safely test the business logic of the listener before opening / resuming it completely. What would be a natural way of doing this?

Answer 1

The latest version (2.8) allows you to fetch individual (or a group) of messages using the KafkaTemplate instead of a message-driven approach.

https://docs.spring.io/spring-kafka/docs/current/reference/html/#kafka-template-receive