With the release of Apache Nifi 1.0 data flows became a multi-tenancy environment with teams of data flow "developers" working simultaneously. In these situations team members may or may not have read and write permission to all components in the flow. One pattern that has emerged to aid in separating work spaces and grouping together components for these different teams is the use of process groups (PG). The "pain point" with this type of approach is that when the Nifi canvas is loaded (or reloaded) it always shows the root group. This is frustrating for team members who want to edit a flow but only have permissions to edit components in a PG that may be nested within several other PGs. In this scenario the team member will need to load the root group, pan or search to find the PG, pan or search to find the PG, pan or.....you get the idea. It is a manual effort to find the nested PG that contains the few components a user has permissions to edit. To ease this the latest Apache Nifi 1.2 release includes the ability to link to any component(s)* anywhere in a flow. This new feature (along with multi-tenancy) allows users to easily collaborate on a data flow just by by sharing a link. Let's take a look at how to use this new feature:
Example:
In the screen shot below notice the URL as well as the breadcrumbs. You see that we have the "Execute Script" processor selected within the "ddd" PG (which is nested inside the root PG) and that this state is reflected in the URL. To share this processor (in this nested PG) with another (authorized) user simply copy the URL from the browser, share it with another user, and have them paste it in their browser and go!
*NOTE: There is a browser and app server limit on the number of characters in a URL. As such, users may link to multiple components as long as this limit is not exceeded.
