Passing a custom class through a Tuple stream is generally frowned upon. It leads to the coupling of custom Operations to particular types, and it removes opportunities for reducing the amount of data that passes over the network.

The first objection can be overcome with a little work. When using a custom type that has multiple instance fields, try to provide Functions that can promote a value from the custom object to a position in a Tuple, or demote the Tuple value for a particular field back into the custom type. This lets you use existing operations like ExpressionFunction or RegexFilter to operate on values owned by a custom type.

For example, if you have a Person object, create a Function named GetPersonAge that takes Person as an argument and returns just the age. The next operation can then Filter all Persons based on their age. This may seem more difficult and less effiicient, but it keeps your application flexible and avoids duplicating existing operations. (The only alternative here is to create a PersonAgeFilter, which becomes one more thing to test.)