[Lens] create strategy for embeddable interaction customization

[drewdaemon]

Background

Consumers of the Lens embeddable (both directly and through wrappers like portable dashboards and unified histogram) often want to customize the user interactions in various parts of the embedded Lens experience.

We currently offer many ways to do this, each added as a need arose. Yet, we continue to have requests for further customizations. This may continue into the foreseeable future.

The ask for this issue is to take a comprehensive look at the situation and define an API that is easy to understand and extend.

Interaction locations

• panel context menu items

• legend menu items

• table cell actions

• tooltip actions

• chart interactions (clicks, brushes)

Desired customizations

• Adding consumer-defined items to a menu
• Overriding default behavior of various user interactions and default options and menu items
• Hiding and showing menu items based on
  • Lens-held knowledge (information that only Lens has — see Require a way to custom legend actions for each group #164479)
  • consumer-held knowledge (information that only the consumer has)

Efforts to date

• [Security Solution][Lens] New trigger actions for chart legends and table cell actions #146779 added a UI actions trigger that the security team is using to add custom and table cell actions. They register actions to the global UI action registry which is then queried in the Lens embeddable.
• [Exploratory view] Allow ability add extra actions in lens embeddable #123713 added an extraActions property to the embeddable component. This allows the consumer to supply a list of custom panel menu actions directly without involving the global UI action registry.
• [Lens] Introduce ability to prevent default behaviour from action callback #152842 added onBrushEnd, onFilter, and onTableRowClick all of which allow a consumer to override default chart interactions
• [Lens] Enable actions on Lens Embeddable #102038 added an actionPredicate callback with the idea of allowing the consumer to hide/show actions based on consumer-held knowledge. This is not currently in use.
• [Lens] Configurable color syncing #86180 added a boolean syncColors property to allow for disabling palette syncing across multiple embeddables
• [Lens][Visualize] Adds option to disable cursor sync on dashboards #143355 added a boolean syncCursor property to allow for disabling cursor syncing across multiple embeddables
• [Visualize][Lens] Sync panels tooltips on dashboard level #130449 added a boolean syncTooltip property to allow for enabling tooltip syncing across multiple embeddables
• Allow disabling action triggers in embeddables #57691 added a boolean disableTriggers property which now powers Lens embeddable's non-interactive mode (added to expressions in df43d25)
• Expression: Add render mode and use it for canvas interactivity #83559 added a renderMode property to expressions which can be used to change interactivity

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-visualizations (Team:Visualizations)

[drewdaemon]

We also have to account for portable dashboards (see this bug #171167).

[drewdaemon]

Related questions come up even in the forum: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-hide-filterfor-filterout-option-in-kibana-visualization/347188

[drewdaemon]

A suggestion from @angorayc:

Please consider registering Lens default actions to ui actions and talk to ui-actions team about a request to add an new api, for example, replaceExistingAction to src/plugins/ui_actions/public/service/ui_actions_service.ts
In this case, consumers who need custom actions could use that api to replace the default actions with their custom actions. Thanks so much for the help!