Input Controls: Planning

[ThomThomson]

Background:
Input controls provide significant user experience benefits on dashboards, and many clusters are already using them. That said, there are architectural, discoverability, and usability issues present in the current implementation of input controls that are preventing wider adoption.

Plan
A broad plan that the Kibana App Team proposed today (March 10th 2020) involves splitting requested features / enhancements for the Input Controls into two phases, so that Input Controls can be improved in their current form in the short term, and then replaced with more architecturally sound and feature complete versions in the longer term. Work on Phase 1 and research / POCs for Phase 2 can be undertaken in parallel.

Phase 1

Phase 1 will involve changes that are straightforward to implement in the current solution, are transferable once the new architecture of input controls is decided upon, or are important to make input controls usable until the phase 2 controls are ready.

Items / Issues considered for Phase 1 include:

• Improve Input Control Discoverability
• Any urgent open bugs e.g. Error importing Control type visualization #16634
• Input Chaining: Control should have a global setting to chain all drop downs and sliders #56913

Phase 2

Phase 2 will involve issues that either change the architecture of input controls, rely on the architecture change as a prerequisite, or are large enough that they wouldn't be worth the potential hassle of writing twice (before & after the architectural change)

Items / Issues Considered for Phase 2 include:

• Determine if the current embeddable format can support all the features Input Controls will need, or if we will have to go a more custom / specific route.
• Custom options in control dropdowns e.g. Allow specifying of default values in Input Controls #56416, Controls Visualization Custom filtering #36744
• Inputs which filter subsequent inputs (Relevant values)

These tasks are steps along the way to GA for input controls: #17231

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app (Team:KibanaApp)

[ThomThomson]

Closing this in favour of #99993.

Input controls is now being re-architected as a separate project.