Good design goes mostly unnoticed. If a user interface works well, you simply complete a task and move on to the next. That time when something doesn't work as expected, or you think why do I have to do it this way, is when the design becomes much more noticeable. The following is a look back over recent months at some notable UI/UX improvements that have recently made or will be soon making their way to Apache NiFi. They vary a lot in size and complexity, but overall they contribute equally to make NiFi better by design. Enable/Disable Support for Multiple Components Much like starting/stopping multiple components on the canvas, now you can enable or disable more than one component at the same time. You can also perform the action on a process group, therefore effecting all applicable components within. If your flow has a large number of stopped components, disabling them can help reduce the load NiFi takes on during validation. NIFI-5066 Automatically Reconnect NiFi Node to Cluster If a mutable request that is replicated across a cluster fails to execute on a particular node, that node will now be asked to rejoin the cluster (as long the flows still match). Previously, manual user interaction was required to make this happen. NIFI-5153 Asynchronous Component Validation Individual components will now display a new state of validating when modified (create, update). Validation will continue at a recurring interval in the background and a component's last known state will continue to show unless modifications have been made, which will trigger the validating status. NIFI-950 NIFI-5186 Set Default Backpressure Thresholds You can now set default object backpressure and data size backpressure thresholds in nifi.properties to better suit your use case. Initially these values are set to 10,000 and 1 GB, respectively. NIFI-3599 NiFi Upgrade Guides A lot of great updates have been made to ease upgrades around all NiFi versions, 0.x to the latest. Additionally, you'll find detailed migration notes highlighting issues between specific NiFi versions. NIFI-3113 New Documentation Around Variables and Flow Versioning The NiFi User Guide was expanded to include a section explaining how variables are captured when placing a process group under version control. This can be especially useful to understand when dealing when nesting process groups. NIFI-5074 Dynamically Select a Connection Pool The DBCPConnectionPool controller service now lets you register multiple connection pools through dynamic properties, which will then allow the selection of one based on an incoming attribute. NIFI-5229 New ForkRecord Processor A nice addition to the *Record processor offering is ForkRecord, allowing you to produce multiple records from one containing an array of records. Additional configuration options allow you to include the parents fields with each record. NIFI-4227 Include File Attributes Option When Using ListFile Processor Since it can be an expensive task in some configurations, ListFile now provides an option to choose whether or not to include file attributes as flowfile attributes. File attributes will continue to be included as the default option. NIFI-5228 HBase_1_1_2_ClientService Controller Service Adds More Expression Language Support The Hadoop Configuration Files property of the HBase_1_1_2_ClientService controller service now supports expression language making it easier to reference long path names using an environment variable, for example. This is now consistent with other Hadoop related components that also have the property. NIFI-5233 ... View more

Good design goes mostly unnoticed. If a user interface works well, you simply complete a task and move on to the next. That time when something doesn't work as expected, or you think why do I have to do it this way, is when the design becomes much more noticeable. The following is a look back over recent months at some notable UI/UX improvements that have recently made or will be soon making their way to Apache NiFi. They vary a lot in size and complexity, but overall they contribute equally to make NiFi better by design. More Control Over Restricted Components New access policies were introduced for more fine-grain control of user interactions with restricted components. For example, permissions can be granted around reading of or writing to a file system, executing code, and keytab file access. Good to know – all new policies introduced are subcategories of the one previously in place, so a user holding a restricted component policy will receive all new ones. Administrators will therefore need to remove any specific restricted component policy they don't want a user to have. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4885 New Controller Service for Specifying Keytabs Related to the previous improvement, you now have the ability to specify the keytab and principal independently of a processor, so flow administrators have greater control of who is able to reference them and they can grant permission on those Controller Services so that only the appropriate users can access them. The description in the referenced JIRA has additional detail and talks about the design decisions made to limit impact on existing flows. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4917 NiFi Registry Command-line Interface (CLI) A new CLI as part of the NiFi Toolkit enables interaction with REST endpoints of the registry to allow importing and upgrading of versioned flows. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4839 Editable Remote Process Group URL Users can now modify the target URL for Remote Process Groups via the NiFi UI as well as the REST API. More details can found in the JIRA description. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4526 NiFi Component Resource Usage Annotation A processor's documentation that is generated will now contain facts about potential high resource usage for things such as high memory, disk space, processing power, and network bandwidth. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4872 New CountText Processor Offering functionality such as line counting, non-empty line counting, word counting, and character counting, this new processor should satisfy a frequent NiFi community request. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4727 New FlattenJSON Processor Satisfying another frequent request from the NiFi community, the FlattenJSON processor will flatten a JSON record into simple key-value pairs no matter how nested a file may be. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4649 EncryptContent Expression Language Support The EncryptContent processor will now support expression language enabling use of a variable to populate the password field with a sensitive value. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4557 Use FlowFile Content with PutEmail A useful improvement now allows FlowFile content to used to populate the message body in the PutEmail processor. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4981 Process Group Information in Search Results When using search each results will show some information about the component's containing process group – very handy when attempting to locate and navigate a larger flow. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4538 Status Bar Icon Tooltips Hovering the icons in the status bar now provide useful explanations about each statistic. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4764 ... View more

Good design goes mostly unnoticed. If a user interface works well, you simply complete a task and move on to the next. That time when something doesn't work as expected, or you think why do I have to do it this way, is when the design becomes much more noticeable. The following is a look back over recent months at some notable UI/UX improvements making their way to Apache NiFi. They vary a lot in size and complexity, but overall they contribute equally to make NiFi better by design. This second edition is light due to a lot of contributor focus on NiFi sub-projects MiNiFi and Registry. There will be many new additions to the NiFi UI related to the NiFi Registry integration and those will be covered in separate articles. The previous (and first) edition highlighting recent NiFi UI/UX improvements from September 2017 can be found here. Available Cores In the UI there were several places where it stated "available processors" to indicate how many cores were available to NiFi. In these instances, "processors" was changed to "cores" to more accurately reflect the intended subject. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4576 Primary Node-Only Processor Identification It helps to know when processors are configured to run only on the primary node of a cluster. Now the UI calls out this fact with a 'P' icon visible on the face of the canvas component and in the Summary table. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4481 Counters Reset Action A confirmation message is now presented to avoid unintentional resets of counter information. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4423 Add Processor Dialog You can now navigate the list of processors after you have filtered it using the up and down keys of your keyboard. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-3803 Add Connection Dialog Previously, if you were to click the Add button in the Add Connection dialog before selecting a required relationship, you'd receive an error message. Instead of allowing this and forcing the user to repeat previous steps to get back, the Add button is now disabled until a relationship is selected. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-3369 ... View more

Good design goes mostly unnoticed. If a user interface works well, you simply complete a task and move on to the next. That time when something doesn't work as expected, or you think why do I have to do it this way, is when the design becomes much more noticeable. The following is a look back over recent months at some notable UI/UX improvements making their way to Apache NiFi. They vary a lot in size and complexity, but overall they contribute equally to make NiFi better by design. Provenance Storage Information NiFi conveniently provides storage information about flowfile and content repositories that it uses when processing. Now you can get those same storage metrics for provenance data within a cluster as well an instance's system diagnostics view. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4341 Managing Variables The first step in configuring and managing reusable name/value pairs in NiFi was committed recently. As with access policies in NiFi, variables are created at a process group level–described as scope in the UI–and made available to supporting components contained within. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4280 Provenance Migration Guidance With a refactored provenance repository introduced in NiFi 1.2, documentation is now available to assist users wanting to better understand the new properties and migrate from a persistent configuration to the newer write-ahead configuration. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4276 User Interaction Shortcuts Just a couple quick mentions that can help increase workflow efficiency: (1) You can double-click a processor on the canvas to quickly open the configuration dialog and (2) also double-click an event node on the provenance lineage graph to get event details. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4266 | https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-1580 Analyzing Startup Times Now startup times printed when deploying NiFi will provide a nice summary in seconds after the very precise–but somewhat difficult to mentally convert–nanosecond count. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4221 OpenID Connect Support Support for authenticating users using the OpenID Connect specification was added. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4210 Expanding Context Menus NiFi UI menu options are growing, making the size of some quite large. Multi-level, or cascading menus have been introduced that will help improve the understanding of available actions by grouping related options together. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-4044 Consistent Sorting of Attributes Flowfile attributes from a queue are now listed alphabetically (by attribute name) just as they always have when viewing them in provenance data. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-3707 Root Process Group Context Menu When right-clicking the canvas the context menu is now more consistent with others by providing actions such as Configure, Start, Stop, etc. Previously these were only available via the Operate palette. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-3181 Link Directly to a Process Group With this improvement it is now possible to copy the URL from your browser's address bar and use it as a direct link to that specific part of the data flow. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-3035 ... View more

NiFi 1.2.0 has a nice, new little feature that will surely please those who may spend a bit of time – for some, perhaps A LOT of time – getting their flow to line up perfectly. The background grid lines can help with this, but the process can still be quite tedious with many components. Now there is a quick, easy way. Select the components on the canvas you want to align. You can do this by either Shift+clicking each component until they are all selected, or while holding Shift, click and (fully) drag around all the components you want to align. Next, simply right-click on any selected component and choose the desired "Align..." option. The next image shows the result after choosing the Align vertically option. If components are different sizes, they will align according to their center points. And that's all there is to it! ... View more