Auto-fill in column description based on criteria

[markgrover]

Expected Behavior or Use Case

Often times, there are cases where a column may exist across multiple tables, but it always means and represents the same thing. For example, at Lyft, all event tables had a created_at column that tracked the time when the event record was created.
Such columns in all event tables would have same description. Description is still useful because it can be event time or processing time and describing that was important. Another example is a partition column like ds or dt, and documenting that is useful and applies across multiple tables.

Service or Ingestion ETL

Metadata service

Possible Implementation

From a user-experience perspective,
Scrappy Option #1 is to apply programmatic descriptions on all columns with a certain name or a certain tag.
Scrappy Option #2 is to make the descriptions (regular descriptions, not programmatic ones) read-only for such columns and have this hard-coded description be the read-only description.
Scrappy Option #3 is to seed the description with a hard-coded description based on a criteria.
In a scrappy version, the description would be hardcoded and applied in neo4j. Over the longer term, we could build an experience for such descriptions in a data dictionary.

• You define a term in the dictionary say "created_at".
• Set the description there.
• Apply that term to any column that follows a pattern (e.g. any column named created_at in tables under schema events)
• Apply the term's description to the associated columns.

Example Screenshots (if appropriate):

Context

More details: https://amundsenworkspace.slack.com/archives/CGFBVT23V/p1609999194249500

[markgrover]

From Tao, you could apply a transformer in the databuilder to set this kind of rule (e.g if column == ‘created_at’ , the description = xxx) so this issue is more of a long term thing since the suggested short term solution works. It's option #3 above.

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