Aliasing and Restricting

Excluding (Restricting) and Aliasing Directives

When an organization wants to expose the data prep tool to its end users, they would like to have the ability to restrict (exclude) directives that are not considered "safe". Safe is a very subjective term and its specification varies from organization to organization. Also, the "safe"ness of an data operation could go through an approval process, and later be excluded from the restricted list. So, in short, the capability to restrict and un-restrict some directives has to be easily configurable.

A second common use-case we have seen is that an organization is accustomed to a organizational jargon and it is hard to adapt by the user. In order to support continuation of usage of their jargon, Data Prep has added the capability to alias a directive through a simple configuration.

Feature

There are two configuration supported by Data Prep now

• Exclusion (a.k.a Restriction) and
• Aliasing

Exclusion allows administrators to specify a list of directives either root directive or aliased directive that should be restricted from invocation and as well as application.

Aliasing allows one to create a new name for a root directive.

Scope

Both Exclusion and Aliasing are namespace wide - meaning they are applicable only within the namespace were the configuration has been applied.

Configuration

Configuration is currently specified as a JSON object with main keys namely

• exclusions
• aliases

Following is a high-level JSON object

{
    "exclusions" : [
      "root-directive",
      ...
      "root-directive"
    ],

    "aliases" : {
      "alias" : "alias-name",
      ...
      "alias" : "alias-name"
    }
}

Exclusion

It's a array of directives that are either loaded by default or could be loaded as UDD (User Defined Directives) or they can also be aliased directives.

Aliases

Is map of aliased directive and the actual directive name to which it's aliased.

Applying Configuration

A service endpoint exists to apply the configuration. In order to apply the configuration, use following REST call.

curl -s -X POST @<path-to-json>/<filename.json> \
 "http://<hostname>:11015/v3/namespaces/<namepsace>/apps/dataprep/services/service/methods/config"

And example would be

curl -s -X POST --data-binary @/tmp/wrangler-config.json \
 http://localhost:11015/v3/namespaces/default/apps/dataprep/services/service/methods/config \
  | python -mjson.tool
{
    "message": "Successfully updated configuration.",
    "status": 200
}