flowinto

Flowinto is a concept in data processing that describes the operation of directing data items from one flow into another. It denotes the act of routing a stream or collection through a pipeline to a downstream consumer or sink, optionally with transformations, filtering, or aggregation along the way.

In practice, flowinto appears in streaming and batch frameworks, message brokers, ETL tools, and reactive programming libraries. It is typically implemented as a function, operator, or configuration that connects a source to a downstream recipient. The exact semantics vary by system, with some applying transformations (map, filter), while others pass items through unchanged.

Common patterns include passthrough, branching (fan-out) to multiple sinks, and merging or joining flows. Flowinto operations may support backpressure, buffering, and windowing, which help manage throughput differences between producers and consumers. The approach is often designed to be composable, enabling complex pipelines to be built by chaining multiple flowinto steps and integrating with various sources and sinks.

Key considerations include ordering guarantees, fault tolerance, and delivery semantics (exactly-once versus at-least-once). Design choices around flowinto influence how errors are handled, how retries are managed, and how state is maintained across pipeline stages. When used effectively, flowinto supports modular, scalable data pipelines that can adapt to changing data volumes and processing requirements.

See also dataflow, streaming, pipes and filters, ETL, sink and source, backpressure, and windowing.