How to get an UnknownTopicOrPart error when producing to a non-existent topic?

[ilyaaxenov]

I have disabled the auto.create.topics.enable option in the Kafka cluster (set to false) and set a 10-second timeout for producing messages (transaction.timeout.ms). When I try to produce a message, I receive a "Message timed out" error, although I expect an UnknownTopicOrPart error instead.

I found out that if the topic.metadata.propagation.max.ms parameter is set to a value at least one second less than transaction.timeout.ms, I get the expected error message.

I have a few questions since this is not obvious to me from the source code:

1. If I set topic.metadata.propagation.max.ms=0, does this guarantee that I will 100% receive an UnknownTopicOrPart error? (assuming the produce timeout can be as short as 1 second)
2. How critical is it to set topic.metadata.propagation.max.ms=0? It seems that this parameter works as a delay when producing a message to a non-existent topic. So, the value 0 seems not to be critical.
3. I need the UnknownTopicOrPart error because I want to manually create the topic if this error occurs during produce. Currently, I receive a timeout, which does not give me an understanding of whether the topic truly does not exist or if there was some internal error. At the same time, I am not sure if this is the right approach to create topics in this way. Maybe this is not the best practice?