markap14 commented on issue #3332: NIFI-6077 Added force Expression Language switch for properties URL: https://github.com/apache/nifi/pull/3332#issuecomment-467028580 Thanks for the PR @rabits! I do agree that we should move toward allowing variables to be referenced from any property. This will make integration with the nifi registry easier and more versatile. However, I think we should go about it in a little bit different way. When a user enters a value for a property, I'd like to see a checkbox in the UI or some other mechanism in the UI to allow the user to indicate "This is the name of a variable I want to reference" versus "This is the value of the property." This approach has a lot of advantages. Firstly, it becomes very clear what the user's intent is. Secondly, it allows us to provide a nicer user experience around variables, such as auto-complete. It clarifies the possible ambiguity between variables and FlowFile Attributes. Additionally, it means that we can substitute in the variable value before performing validation so that validation is made more useful. It also means that a sensitive property could reference a variable and we can be safe in providing the name of that variable to the flow registry when versioning a flow. However, we do need to support sensitive variables as well, in order for this to work cleanly. This would allow us to encrypt the sensitive variable at-rest and not provide it back in the UI, and we could enforce that a sensitive property only reference a sensitive variable. This way, we can still avoid sending sensitive configuration values to the flow registry. So while I do agree with the concept of allowing variables for all properties, I think we need to take a more wholistic approach that works well throughout the entire nifi ecosystem.
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