More expressive field formatters via custom directives

[w33ble]

As mentioned in #4357, a user may want to query another data source (elasticsearch or otherwise) to resolve that value to a label. We'd like to have a way to make field formatters more powerful and allow users to do things like this.

The current proposal is to allow users to create custom directives and use them in field formatters. This would give them access to $http, the courier, and any other resources they may need.

[cmbaxter]

This sounds great and I very much am looking forward to it being included in Kibana. A quick question on the approach though. Say I define a new formatter for a field that makes an http request to get the label info. If I'm on the Discover tab and I pull back a few hundred rows and all of them contain the same value for an id field (say productId) that I defined that new formatter for, will it make hundreds of queries to my rest endpoint to get the labels even though it's all the same id? I guess what I'm suggesting is that the code for this new feature be smart enough to only hit the rest endpoint once per unique field value it is applying the new formatter to.

[w33ble]

Yeah, we'll need to memoize the request somehow so that the formatter knows that that product id is what's determining the label and only makes the request once per id. Ideally we'll be able to do this either automatically or via some very simple config of handler as part of the directive.

[spider-network]

+10^10

It will be grade to create a mapping index.

[roynasser]

+1 for a way to map IDs to values on another index or lookup mapping, for cases when the values be changed from the time they were logged to when they are being displayed (i.e. to obtain fresh user data from a user ID, etc).

[hadiartik]

+1 for the lookup capability in Kibana

[jpcruveilher]

+1

[guruxu]

👍👍👍
or make fields in inner_hits fully accessible

[scampi]

@w33ble it is already possible to have a custom directive when using a table https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/4c535f6/src/ui/public/directives/rows.js#L41
However, I am not sure that this is respected everywhere.

Field formatters return two implementations, i.e., html and text. In places where the text implementation is taken, a custom directive wouldn't be taken I think.

This issue seems related to #6416 and might provide a solution for it too, if the above problem is resolved.

[fhasanaj]

+1

[hashimmm]

+1

[afrobeard]

+1

[faizana]

+1

[zakirmehmood]

+1

[gokhancamas]

+1

[literarymachine]

+1

[cinhtau]

👍

[markchagers]

+1

[xav-p]

+1

[jag959]

+1

[cjcenizal]

We're moving from Angular to React, so the details of this issue won't be applicable. #3585 proposes the addition of custom scripts for field formatters which I believe would address the original intent behind this issue. Closing in favor of #3585.