[NIFI-3006] Allow dynamic PropertyDescriptors to auto-populate name/displayName

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 1.0.0
• Component/s: Core Framework
• Labels: dynamic readability
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Andy LoPresto
• Created: 09/Nov/16 00:17
• Updated: 09/Nov/16 00:17

Description

As discussed during a review of PR 1045, it would be useful to allow dynamic PropertyDescriptor s to automatically populate either the .name or .displayName field from the user-provided value. This would likely involve writing utility methods for either humanize() and/or symbolize().

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From the PR comment:

Obviously the name is provided by the user at runtime, but should we still try to define a displayName for the PropertyDescriptor? I could see three possibilities:

• name and displayName are identical – not much value
• name is as provided, displayName is the parameter passed through a humanize()-type method (see below)
• displayName is as provided, name is the parameter passed through a symbolize()-type method (see below)

The transform methods humanize()/symbolize() could be as simple as title-casing and adding/removing spaces at word boundary guesses.

I'm not sure how much energy this is worth investing, as these property names are not constants which will be retained across instances of the processor, but I think they still would lose the state persisted in the flow.xml.gz if it was somehow modified.