i have an ETL pipeline with 5 steps. Each step can be executed on a different thread and different application.

That makes it really hard to pass down the otel trace context through everything because the internals are not available for me so all i have access to are the processings steps.

What iam looking for is a way to construct the trace context just from a single id which uniquely identifies a complete run through all the 5 steps of a single data entry.

Example:

What iam looking for is code which works a little bit like this:

public class Step1 {
    public void execute(DataPackage obj){
         var otelContext = SpanContext.create(
              TraceId.fromBytes(obj.getUniqueId().getBytes()),
              SpanId.fromBytes(processorName.getBytes()),
              TraceFlags.getDefault(),
              TraceState.getDefault()
         );

         var wrap = Span.wrap(otelContext);

         var with = Context.root().with(wrap);
  
         var span = tracer.spanBuilder("Step1").setParent(with).startSpan();
         CompletableFuture.runAsync(() -> { /* the code is here*/ }).whenComplete((c1, exception) -> {
         if (exception != null) {
           span.recordException(exception);
         } else {
           span.end();
         }
       });
    }
}

What happens is that the start and the end of the span are separate and not under the same trace context. So something goes wrong here