Improve landing pages for Dashboard and Visualize Apps

[cjcenizal]

Problems

It's hard to find the objects you're looking for

When you have a lot of objects to comb through, it's difficult to find the one you're looking for.

It's hard to tell similarly-named objects apart

Aside from the name, the user doesn't have access to any meta-data to help differentiate similar objects. So the user is forced to open up multiple objects and visually compare them to figure out which is which.

Relationship between Visualizations and Dashboards isn't clear

It's hard to tell which visualizations are related to which dashboard(s). A user can easily delete a visualization without realizing it will break the dashboards which depend on it.

Ownership isn't apparent

Multiple users on a shared Kibana instance introduces several problems:

• Users that are simultaneously editing a single document can easily overwrite each others' changes accidentally. This is a huge problem in a large organization. Having document owners and restricting visibility/permissions seems like the obvious solution to this problem.
• Visualizations become more difficult to manage (it's difficult to tell which ones are used and which can be deleted).

Solution: Organize documents in a table view

Searchability

Tables will be searchable and filterable, so users can find what they're looking for.

Metadata

We can present more metadata for each document:

• ID
• Name
• Owner (created by)
• Last modified by
• Visualization type
• Visibility (private, publicly viewable, publicly editable)
• Date created
• Date edited
• Change history
• Thumbnail preview
• Description
• Tags (saved object tagging phase 1 #16484)

Child issues

• Dashboard and Visualize landing pages #9722

Other issues this will address

• improvement of the loading panel (use of the wide space) #1565

[Bargs]

Ah, yes, the CMS problem :)

[cjcenizal]

This will help pave the way for stacey-gammon#1 because we'll be able to get rid of the "Open" and "New" menu items in the header.

[uboness]

Can we change the title of this issue to something that better captures the feature:

"Add landing pages to Dashboard, Discover and Visualize Apps"

While I understand the rational of the "edited by multiple users". This is not necessarily the main reason why we need these landing pages. For me, it's simply what I'd expect when I click on any of these apps.

Also, will be good to open 3 separate issues (one for each app) and turn this one to be a meta issue pointing to those.

the tables will be searchable and filterable... the filters will depend on the listed items (we'll work on those in the dedicated issues)

If we can manipulate documents via a table, then we can see more information associated with each document:

ID
Name
Owner (created by)
Last modified by
Visualization type
Visibility (private, publicly viewable, publicly editable)
Date created
Date edited
Change history
Thumbnail preview

We should define the columns needed per view (should be discussed in the dedicated issues)... in general though we can start simple:

• Name
• Description
• Last edited
• Tags (once supported by all items)

Notes:

• IDs should probably be auto-generated UUIDs so they're meaningless to the user... no need to show them.
• Ownership, last edited by, etc... these are only applicable in the context of x-pack... should not leak to core.
• Thumbnails will be great, but no need to invest in it at the moment. We'll need to add special support for it in the visualizations such that all visualizations can render themselves to canvas (viz's that can't, will need to render a default placeholder that represent them.. e.g. tile maps). We don't need to do this now... we will eventually have a card based layout that include thumbnails, but this should not be a blocker in any way.

[cjcenizal]

CC @alexfrancoeur @AlonaNadler

[timroes]

I would like to close that Meta issue, since it has been open for a long time and I think we're having more specific issues right now for e.g. tagging of saved objects (#16484), or sorting issues (#14687).