About Visual Builder

[chuyan]

Hi all,
I would like to ask if the Visual Builder feature is stable in V5.6 and above. And as it is still experimental in current version(6.2), will it become official in future plans.

Thank you.

[timroes]

The Visual Builder is still (also in 6.2 and the upcoming release 6.3) marked as experimental.

That means, that it might change more often than our non-experimental visualizations. It also means, that we are still evaluating how well it will work and whether or not we want to move it to stable at some point in which case we would guarantee way higher backward compatibility.

That doesn't necessarily say anything about the functional stability of that visualization (i.e. not containing bugs). In case of the Visual Builder I would say, that it's as stable as most of our visualizations.

Regarding experimental status: it most likely won't become non-experimental in any of the upcoming minor versions, since we are still seeing a coupe of issues regarding it's usability, it's design with an app-in-app experience and the understanding of it's functionality among users. So we most likely won't mark is as non-experimental before we have a solution for some of the issues we are seeing.

Cheers,
Tim

[chuyan]

Thank you Tim, does it mean that it won't be deprecated in future plans?
Our product uses it a lot, I would like to know if we can still count on it in the next releases.

Thanks.

[timroes]

No it doesn't mean that.

Visual builder could be deprecated the same way as any other (experimental or non-experimental) feature. In fact experimental features might be a bit more likely to be deprecated.

But we also check around the usage of the visualization, and we know that Visual Builder is currently used rather often, so it's unlikely, that IF we would deprecate it, that we will remove it without at least having a majority of the same features in other parts of Kibana. And most likely there will be a rather long time between deprecation and removal of the feature (aka a major version at least).

To be a bit more specific about Visual Builder: We are currently looking into building a new editor (https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/17076) which will be one of the long running efforts during the 6.x lifecycle. Once this is done, we are trying to align all charts on the same editor again (instead of having that unaligned and fragmented UX in Kibana, meaning we will try to merge the features we have in Visual Builder into the core visualizations (or vice versa, but with one editor for all). And if we would then figure out, that we have the majority of features available in all visualizations, we would reevaluate what use-case Visual Builder still provides, and maybe that wouldn't be enough to keep it alive.

But as mentioned, this is a super long running effort, so I would say, you can safely rely on it being still present in the upcoming releases and you can be rather sure, you won't see any deprecation warning before there is a near feature-parity with the new editor (or other parts of Kibana).

Cheers,
Tim