Applications abide by a contract that reporting features use to determine the information that is required to request exports of data from Kibana, and how to generate and store the reports.

Reporting Export Typesedit

"Export Types" are pieces of code that plug into the Kibana Reporting framework, and are responsible for exporting data on behalf of a Kibana application. These pieces of code are implemented as TypeScript classes that extend an abstract base class, and implement methods for controlling the creation of report jobs, and asynchronously generating report contents. Their createJob methods handle requests to create report jobs, by accepting jobParams objects and returning "task payload" objects. Their runTask methods generate the report contents by accepting the task payload object created from the createJob function, which is then stored in a system index in Elasticsearch.

Share menu extensionsedit

X-Pack services, such as the reporting features, register with the share plugin of the Kibana platform to register additional actions available to make content shareable.

Generate a report job URLedit

To generate a new reporting job, different export types require different jobParams objects, which are Rison-encoded and used as a jobParams query string variable in the Reporting generation endpoint URL. If you use the aforementioned Sharing plugin registrations then this detail will be abstracted away. If your application does not use the Share menu extensions, you will have to generate the URL and create a POST request to the URL.

Basic job parametersedit

Certain fields of Reporting job parameters are required for every type of export.

interface BaseParams {
  title: string; 
  objectType: string; 
  browserTimezone: string; 
  version: string; 
};

CSVedit

Job parameters of CsvSearchSourceedit

The export type to generate CSV reports and is available in Discover uses "search source" objects. This export type is called csv_searchsource in the code. A configuration for a CSV report job is represented with an interface that includes the BaseParams and the following fields. To create a request for a CSV report, these required job parameters are Rison encoded into a query string variable of the report generation URL:

interface JobParamsCSV {
  searchSource: SerializedSearchSourceFields; 
  columns?: string[]; 
};

Job parameters of CsvFromSavedObjectedit

A newer export type to generate CSV reports is available, currently only by API. This export type is called csv_v2 in the code.

interface JobParamsCsvFromSavedObject {
  locatorParams: LocatorParams[]; 
};

Job payloadedit

After the job parameters are received by the route handler for the report generation URL, an additional field is automatically added to the fields from job parameters:

interface TaskPayloadCSV {
  pagingStrategy: 'scan' | 'pit' 
}

PDF and PNGedit

Job parametersedit

A configuration for a PDF or PNG report job is represented with an interface that includes the BaseParams and the following fields. To create a request for one of these report types, these required job parameters are encoded into a query string variable of the report generation URL:

interface BaseParamsPDFV2 {
  layout: {
    id: string; 
    dimensions: {
      height: number;
      width: number;
    };
  };
  locatorParams: LocatorParams[]; 
}

interface BaseParamsPNGV2 {
  layout: {
    id: string; 
    dimensions: {
      height: number;
      width: number;
    };
  };
  locatorParams: LocatorParams; 
}

How applications make themselves screenshot-capableedit

When generating the PDF, the headless browser launched by the Reporting export type runs a script that looks for a number of attributes in the DOM to determine which elements should have their screenshot taken and when the Visualizations are done rendering.

The print layout takes a screenshot of every element with the data-shared-item attribute and includes the individual screenshots in the PDF. The print layout also uses the data-title and data-description attributes on the same HTMLElement as the data-shared-item to specify the title and description.

The preserve layout takes a screenshot of the element with the data-shared-items-container attribute. Additionally, reporting will resize the element with the data-shared-items-container to be the size specified in the layout dimensions. The preserve layout also uses the data-title and data-description attributes on the HTMLElement with the data-shared-items-container attribute to specify the title/description for the entire PDF.

Reporting needs to determine when all of the visualizations have completed rendering, so that it can begin taking screenshots. If there are multiple visualizations, the data-shared-items-count attribute should be specified to let Reporting know how many Visualizations to look for. Reporting will look at every element with the data-shared-item attribute and use the corresponding data-render-complete attribute and renderComplete events to listen for rendering to complete. When rendering is complete for a visualization the data-render-complete attribute should be set to "true" and it should dispatch a custom DOM renderComplete event.

If the reporting job uses multiple URLs, before looking for any of the data-shared-item or data-shared-items-count attributes, it waits for a data-shared-page attribute that specifies which page is being loaded.