Allow for display of pipeline | canvas widget properties in the Visual Pipeline Editor

As the creator of a notebook pipeline I would like to embed human-readable information in my [notebook] flow that enables other users to quickly determine what the purpose of (1) the pipeline and (2) the included notebooks is. For illustrative purposes let’s look at this pipeline, courtesy of https://github.com/CODAIT/covid-notebooks

Assuming user A has created this pipeline and shared it with user B (through whatever means), there’s currently a potential information loss risk unless additional information is shared through other means (email, slack message, verbal communication, etc). This information could entail:

• what’s the origin of the pipeline
• what’s the purpose of the pipeline
• what’s the purpose of a pipeline component (this information is likely embedded in the notebook but requires the user to open it to find out)

Even if a creator currently chooses descriptive notebook names(like it was done here, e.g. etl_us_data), user B wouldn’t know what us_data is referring to unless he/she opens the notebook or, in case of generic notebooks, inspects input parameter values or is aware of the pipeline origins. As of today, a pipeline creator would have to embed information about the origin and purpose of the pipeline in one of the notebooks (to make the pipeline “self-explaining”), which doesn’t seem to be the appropriate place to convey the information, since a notebook might be part of many pipelines.

[bourdakos1]

I would opt for a dedicated PIPELINE PROPERTIES tab instead maybe?

This would also be a good place to potentially add a global defaults system

[ptitzler]

Yes, they could be used but this approach unfortunately does not define context information. For example, is a comment describing the pipeline, a notebook or something else? While a human can infer this if comments are properly positioned (or by interpreting the content), it cannot be done automatically. As a result the information could not be easily externalized outside the editor.

For example, let’s say sometime in the future we want to enable a pipeline “preview” in a navigator that would display the pipeline comment, if one was defined and the user hovers over the pipeline name