[Lens] Make "auto-apply" behavior configurable

[flash1293]

Build a switch to auto-run or not. It should be as global as possible and resemble the behavior of Visualize where it shows a big "apply" button which runs all changes

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app (Team:KibanaApp)

[flash1293]

My proposal for the style of this - we already have an extremely similar UI for vega, I propose we simply re-use it for Lens as well:

Default view, auto apply on:

Auto apply turned off, no pending changes:

Auto apply turned off, pending changes:

What do you think @MichaelMarcialis ? Can we start with this?

[rayafratkina]

It took me a full minute to find these buttons...
I would propose placing the switch much more prominently - if I am used to seeing stuff change immediately, I will not notice/forget about these and it will be really jarring.

[MichaelMarcialis]

Thanks, @flash1293. This is an interesting concept. I like that it has some consistency with another visualization editor app that users may be familiar with. That said, I do have concerns about this suggested placement of the auto-apply UI within Lens, both from a discoverability and hierarchical perspective. Placing these controls at the bottom of layer section will likely lead users into thinking that these controls only involve changes made to the layer section (when in fact, these controls will involve changes made to other areas as well, such as the workspace toolbar options).

When we first began discussing this feature, my first instinct was to place such controls to appear more global to the app, in the top white bar (adjacent to inspect, save, etc). I'd probably also desire to consolidate or minimize certain aspects of the Vega-like controls (such as moving the keyboard shortcut tooltip to the update button rather than an extraneous icon, reducing the size/prominence of the discard and auto-apply on/off toggle, etc.)

I would love to take a design pass at this myself, but I'm currently out-of-pocket with other priorities until the mid-8.2 development cycle. Is the team in a position to be able to wait until that point, or do you need to begin engineering sooner? If sooner, let me know and I can chat with my manager (@ryankeairns) to see if there's some priority shuffling we can do.