Cross App Renderer Alignment

[ppisljar]

Currently we have 3 consumers of expressions: visualize, canvas and lens.

All of them support rendering different charts and for many charts we have 3 implementations. We should align and maintain a single implementation of each chart which should be reusable in any application.

Visualize supported charts:

• vis_type_vislib
  is a vistype that contains pie, area, line, bar, horzontal_bar , goal, gauge and heatmap charts.
  Its deprecated and we plan to replace it in the future. Currently only visualize is using it and we should not spread the usage to other apps, even thou the renderers are written in a way that they are reusable outside of visualize, the actual expression functions are not written in a manner that they could be used from canvas.

• vis_type_timeseries
  this is the visualization backing TSVB. Its deprecated, so please don't use it. TSVB supports xy charts, tables and gauges.

• vis_type_timelion
  visuaization backing timelion. Its deprecated, so please don't use it. we have a timelion expression functions that allows you to query for data using timelion syntax. Use any of the supported chart types to render the output.

• vis_type_xy needs cleanup before it can be reused [Canvas] XY_VIS #110430
  should be the xy replacement for vislib, but currently (apart from it using the elastic charts underneath) its not really written in a way that could be used in other places. This is probably the vis type that needs some attention (asap) to make it reusable. It supports line, bar and area charts, which should replace the vislib ones. This is going to be a large effort and will be tracked as a separate project which we will start once this one is finished.

• vis_type_vega
  allows you to render vega lite specs. this vis_type is fully reusable and could be used outside of visualize (lens, canvas)

• vis_type_markdown
  markdown visualization is fully reusable

• vis_type_metric
  metric visualization that visualize uses. Its fully reusable and should be used in other places like lens and canvas

• vis_type_tagcloud
  tagclud visualization that visualize uses. Its fully reusable and shuld be used in other places like lens and canvas

• vis_type_table
  the table visualization visualize uses. Its fully reusable and should be used in other places like lens and canvas

Canvas visualizations/renderers

• plot should be dropped in favour of vis_type_xy once that is ready to be reused [Canvas][meta] Unify Expression Renderers and Deprecate flot #101377
• pie should be dropped in favour of vis_type_pie once that one is extracted from lens
• metric should be dropped in favor of vis_type_metric
• markdown should be dropped in favor of vis_type_markdown
• progress should be moved into its own plugin
• image should be moved into its own plugin
• shape should be moved into its own plugin
• repeat_image should be moved into its own plugin
• reveal_image should be moved into its own plugin
• embeddable should be moved into its own plugin
• filters should be moved into its own plugin (blocked on [canvas] remove filters function #113530)
• error should be moved into its own plugin
  Lens visualizations

Lens is using its own visualization types. Historically we want that way to allow lens to move forward faster, but we are probably at the point that we should revisit this.

• xy_visualization should be dropped in favor of vis_type_xy
• pie_chart should be moved to vis_type_pie. should relace vis_type_vislib pie chart in visualize
• table_visualization should be dropped in favor of vis_type_table
• metric_visualization should be dropped in favor of vis_type_metric

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app-services (Team:AppServices)

[elasticmachine]

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

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-presentation (Team:Presentation)

[flash1293]

A large difference between lens and other expression existing expression renderers is lens_multi_table - see #74643

I don't have a good idea how to unify this without creating an API which will be hard to understand for humans editing the expression. Do you have an idea @ppisljar ?

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/datavis (Team:DataVis)

[Kuznietsov]

@ppisljar, this is a new issue with a plan of unification of xy chart for all the plugins (VisEditors/Lens/Canvas): #127115.

[ThomThomson]

Closing this as the initiative was partially completed and we currently are not prioritizing work to align Canvas with the rest of Kibana.