Visualization Request/Response handler changes

[timroes]

This issue is purely meant for documentation some developer changes, so it will be pulled into the automatically generated blog post.

Dev-Docs

Visualization Request/Response Handlers

Visualizations request and response handlers have been refactored and thus a couple of changes are required for plugins that provide custom visualizations, no matter if they used a custom request or response handler or not.

Related PRs: #19061, #22583

New tabify format

The default so called tabify format (tabular representation of data) has changed towards the following structure:

{
  columns: [
    {
      aggConfig: AggConfig,
      id: 'column1',
      title: 'column title',
    },
    //...
  ],
  rows: [
    {
      column1: 10,
      column2: 'sample',
    },
    //...
  ]
}

The main difference is, that each row is no longer an array of values, but an object where the key is the column id and the value the value for that column.

Request handlers

The default (courier) request handler will now return this new tabify format, instead of a raw elasticsearch response.

In case your plugin provides a custom request handler, we're recommending to return that tabified format too. This is not required at the moment, but makes it easier for your plugin to adjust to upcoming changes.

Response handlers

The old tabify response handler has been removed, since the default request handler now returns that tabified format. The default response handler is now none which just pass through the request handlers result.

Also the response handler doesn't recieve a vis parameter anymore, but only a single parameter which holds the tabified data.

Legacy response handler

For an easier conversion you can still use the old tabify format, by setting responseHandler: 'legacy' in your visualization type registration. This response handler converts the new tabify format to the old format.

The legacy response handler is deprecated! You should only switch to this in case you can't (immediately) update your visualization easily to the new tabify format. We will remove the legacy response handler in 7.0.

Basic response handler

The basic response handler has been renamed to vislib.

You should NOT use this response handler outside of Kibana.