I think this is a good idea. But based on your example I think you would want to provide a primary Type along with a list of Alias types. If NiFi starts and it can no longer find a processor by the Type name it had in the flow.xml it can check he annotations/aliases to see if it's been renamed. This would allow for easy renames.
Example 1: NiFi can no longer find AzureDocumentDBProcessor. Developer renamed it to CosmosDBProcessor. In this case we don't really want the type to still same "DocumentDB", that's just confusing. Also, we might not want the type named CosmosDBProcessor. So we make the Type be something nice, like "Azure Comos DB", then add Aliases for "AzureDocumentDBProcessor" and "CosmosDBProcessor". Next year when Microsoft renames it "CelestialDB" we can rename the processor and add another alias. Something like that? -----Original Message----- From: Sivaprasanna [mailto:sivaprasanna...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2018 23:37 To: dev@nifi.apache.org Subject: [EXT] Suggestion: Apache NiFi component enhancement All, Currently the "type" of a component is actually the component's canonical class name which gets rendered in the UI as the class name with the component version. This is good. However I'm thinking it is better to have an annotation which a developer can use to override the component type. How is it used? I think an annotation can be sufficient. The framework checks if the annotation is present or not, if it is present, it uses the name provided there or else it uses the class name like how it is happening. Why and where is it needed? - In scenarios where we devise a new naming convention and want to apply it to older components without breaking backward compatibility - A developer had created a component class with a name but later down the line, the developer or someone else wants to change it to something else, the reason could again be naming convention or just that the new name makes more sense - A component that has been built to work with third party tech, like Azure, MongoDB, S3, Druid processors but the later versions of that tech has been changed to something else by the original creators. (Something similar has happened to Azure's DocumentDB which got later rebranded as Azure CosmosDB). In such cases, without deprecating or rebuilding a new processor, this can be used. Before creating a JIRA, I wanted to get the community's thoughts. Feel free to share your thoughts, concerns. If everything seems fine, I'll start working on the implementation. - Sivaprasanna
