Plugin API changes in 8.1

In a distributed environment, it can be hard to understand what Kibana entity initiated a request to the Elasticsearch server. To overcome this problem, we introduced execution_context to attach domain-specific metadata to every request.

execution_context propagates specified metadata from the Kibana browser app or Kibana server to the Elasticsearch server through the x-opaque-id header emitted to the Elasticsearch slow logs. For details, check the troubleshooting guide.

The execution_context has the following interface:

export type KibanaExecutionContext = {
  /** {kib} application initated an operation.*/
  readonly type: string; // 'visualization' | 'actions' | 'server' | ..;
  /** public name of a user-facing feature */
  readonly name: string; // 'TSVB' | 'Lens' |  'action_execution' | ..;
  /** unique value to identify the source */
  readonly id: string;
  /** human readable description. For example, a vis title, action name */
  readonly description: string;
  /** in browser - url to navigate to a current page, on server - endpoint path, for task: task SO url */
  readonly url?: string;
  /** a context that spawned the current context. */
  parent?: KibanaExecutionContext;
};

A Kibana plugin can attach request-specific metadata to an outbound HTTP request on the client side as follows:

const parentContext = {
  type: 'my-app',
  name: 'my-plugin-ui-feature',
  id: '42',
  description: 'Retrieve number of X for Y',
};
async function getData() {
  return await http.get('...', { headers: new ExecutionContextContainer(parentContext).toHeader() });

On the server-side, you must wrap an async operation with the withContext helper:

 const chainB = service.withContext({
  type: 'my-app-server',
  name: 'my-plugin-server-feature',
  id: '43',
  description: 'Query Z',
  },
 async () => {
   return  await esClient.search(...);
 }
);

Then, in Elasticsearch slow logs, you might find that a request was initiated by my-plugin-ui-feature of my-app application and proxied through my-plugin-server-feature of my-app-server app:

x-opaque-id: ${requestId};kibana:my-app:my-plugin-ui-feature:42;my-app-server:my-plugin-server-feature:42

Refer to #119932.

Saved objects now support optional validation schemas using @kbn/config-schema.

When a validation schema is provided during type registration, it is used to validate subsequent calls to the SavedObjectClient create and bulkCreate APIs. Validation schemas are not currently enforced on update operations.

We recommend adding a new validation schema any time attributes are added, removed, or changed in your Saved Object type. This schema helps protect data integrity by preventing users from inadvertently importing malformed objects.

import { SavedObjectsValidationMap } from 'src/core/server';

const validationMap: SavedObjectsValidationMap = {
  '8.0.0': schema.object({
    foo: schema.string(),
  }),
  '8.1.0': schema.object({
    foo: schema.string({
      minLength: 2,
      validate(value) {
        if (!/^[a-z]+$/.test(value)) {
          return 'must be lowercase letters only';
        }
      }
    }),
  }),
};

coreSetup.savedObjects.registerType({
  name: 'my-type',
  hidden: false,
  namespaceType: 'agnostic',
  mappings: {
    properties: {
      foo: { type: 'text' },
    },
  },
  migrations: {
    '8.1.0': (doc) => ({ ...doc, attributes: { ...doc.attributes, foo: doc.attributes.foo.toLowerCase() } }),
  },
  schemas: validationMap,
});

Refer to #118969.