Yes, I have been hampered by the same issue with new controllers being created as you described. Promoting the flow.xml.gz between environments seems to have little real-world support in NiFi to make it easy to do. People say Expression Language (EL) is the answer, but then you look and many properties do not support Expression Language. If a single required property that varies between your environments does not support EL (and many passwords do not support it), then EL fails as a solution. Furthermore even if EL were implemented for every ui editable processor property, it is a major issue that the remote input/output ports embed your NiFi server names when they are created and can not be changed without being deleted and having a new port created in its place. So until major enhancements to NiFi are added to address these issues, promoting across environments will be a huge headache and it greatly weakens the enterprise readiness of NiFi. I consider this the largest issue hindering using NiFi in large systems with different environments. Please enlighten me if I have missed something. I truly am impressed with NiFi and it does many great things, but this is an unfortunate flaw.
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