DataStage KafkaConnector should support kafka producer and consumer interceptors

We are using DataStage to move large volumes of data into our data lake.

We are using DataStage kafkaconnector to read/write records from/to our kafka cluster and we will be using the Avro serializer and schema registry support that was just delivered to the kafka connector at the end of Q2 2020. We have a security requirement that messages in our kafka topics be encrypted so we need the ability to tell the kafka producer that is run internally by the DataStage kafka connector to run a producer interceptor (in Java this is org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.ProducerInterceptor) that would encrypt messages as the connector publishes them to the kafka topic. Similarly we need support for ConsumerInterceptor that would decrypt messages when we use the kafkaconnector as source.

In the datastage 11.5 product documentation we found mention of a 'kafka config' property on the kafka connector stage. In the 11.7 documentation this mention has been removed. Such a 'kafka config' property on the kafka connector stage is one method that allows us to 'inject' our interceptors. Through this property we can set kafka config 'interceptor.classes' (org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.ProducerConfig.INTERCEPTOR_CLASSES_CONFIG and org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.ConsumerConfig.INTERCEPTOR_CLASSES_CONFIG) to call our own Kafka Interceptor java class that encrypts/decrypts the data. We would need a way to tell the KafkaConnector the location of our jar with interceptor implementations and perhaps the connector classpath property on the KafkaConnector would let us do this.