Shortened url documents do not get removed from kibana index when dashboard is deleted

[ppf2]

It looks like shortened url documents are added to the .kibana index when it is requested, but these url documents remain in the index forever - even if the parent dashboard is deleted from Kibana. Should there be some kind of cleanup mechanism?

Applies to other objects like Saved Search and Visualization as well.

[tbragin]

@stacey-gammon @kobelb that seems more like a bug to me, what do you think?

[ppf2]

One thing to be aware of if we decide to implement this:

We also allow shortened urls to be generated without saving objects (and we have users who are using this feature) - meaning that they will run a query from Discover, then click on the share/shortened url link without saving it as a saved search. This also will generate a URL document into the kibana index.

This means we will also have to first skip all the url documents with urls that are not tied to any object type, and for the ones with urls that are tied to an object, check to see if that object still exists, if not, delete the url document. And maybe also offer an interface where users can query the shortened urls not associated to objects and selectively delete the ones they no longer use, etc..

[stacey-gammon]

It looks like with the current set up this won't be very simple fix. All that is stored in es is the original url and the urlId. In order to detect whether the url was generated from a saved object that no longer exists, you have to manually parse the url. This won't be efficient.

Moving forward, we should probably store the document id for the generated short url, so that it would be easier, and faster, to delete all short urls associated with it when the object itself is deleted. I'll investigate the effort involved in this.

It also sounds like we will need some kind of management section for this, since as you point out, some short urls are based off unsaved objects.

[alexPolisevschi]

Is there an update on this? I see the issue is opened in 2017.
I had a request today to delete a shortened URL in production, from one of our Kibana users.

[ThomThomson]

I'm not sure if this is a problem that can be solved at the dashboard level. This is more of a problem with the saved objects service all together in that we aren't able to automatically clean up objects that are unused. A fix will need to be built universally.

I've reassigned to @elastic/appex-sharedux because I think this may fall under the umbrella of the content management initiative? If this is meant for a different team we can reassign, or if this is not a priority we can close.

[vadimkibana]

This is a potential feature, but currently there are no plans for implementing it.