All,
Two tickets Bob Mills wrote [1] [2] got me thinking about some cool new
things we could possibly do with nars. Wanted to put the ideas to the group,
get some feedback, and if positive create tickets.
One of Bob's tickets asked for a way for a user to provide "top level"
documentation like "User Guide" "Expression Language Guide" "Admin Guide", and
the other asks for a way to expose the version number of a nar in the UI
somewhere. I'm wondering if his first idea could be modified to be "a nar
should be able to provide highlevel documentation about it's self"
I would propose the following features be added to nars, and how they are
presented inside the application.
1) As discussed in NIFI-666, allow a nar to specify its version, provider,
provider url
2) Update the generated component documentation such that the top of each
page has a breadcrumb that could look something like:
nar-name-version/type/component-name
Where type could be Processor, ControllerService or ReportingTask
3) Allow a nar to contain a "docs" folder containing html documents. This
provides a place for a nar to provide documentation about it's self. This
would allow an XML nar to describe XPath and XSLT. A database nar could
describe SQL. etc.
4) Show nars themselves in the "NiFi Documentation" page, where clicking on
a nar shows you all the metadata in (1), the documentation described in (3),
links to all the component documentation contained in that nar, and a tree of
the other nars this nar depends on
5) Change NiFi documentation to support two views.
a) group by type. This is the current view. groups all Processors,
ControllerServices and ReportingTasks together.
b) group by nar. This is a new view that would group by nar at the
top level, then underneath each nar would show the Processors,
ControllerServices and Reporting tasks it contains.
7) Add a "templates" directory in a nar, where a user can include prebuilt
NiFi xml templates in their nar. Automatically load these templates into the
templates list when the nar is in the nar directory.
What does everyone think?
[1]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-66<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-667>6
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-667
Dan Bress
Software Engineer
ONYX Consulting Services
