Change the index pattern on a visualization

[jgough]

One of the most requested features in Kibana was the ability to change the index pattern on a visualisation. This issue was eventually closed as it was implemented in Kibana's Lens feature.

Currently, once a visualisation has been made then it is impossible to change the index pattern unless you go into "Saved Objects" and manually alter the visualisation JSON, which is cumbersome, open to all sorts of issues and definitely not for casual users.

It would be useful to provide some simple mechanism to allow users to alter the index pattern once a chart has been created - maybe similar to how index patterns can be changed in the Discover tab.

(Also see elastic/kibana#3668 for additional discussion)

[JacobBrandt]

Related to #379. The ability to change index patterns is a feature of this new visualization creation experience I'm proposing here.

[joshuarrrr]

So the trick here is in how to handle field mapping; we'd probably want some sort of friendly UX to allow the user to choose which fields in the new index pattern correspond to those in the old.

[joshuarrrr]

We're currently looking for someone to take over and finish this PR: #1132

The remaining work is essentially:

• update the PR by merging/rebasing with main
• manual testing to figure out if anything is broken here, if it breaks other plugins, and if it needs to be extended to other use cases

[sandervandegeijn]

We are very much in need of this feature, would save a ton of time when changing out the data architecture but not the underlying data. Exporting/importing is too error prone

[zentavr]

Any updates on this?