Be able to hide create / append anything behind a feature toggle

[nikku]

What should we do?

The connectors extension uses connectorsExtension.appendAnything=false to not show it. We could simply re-use that flag:

// create modeler
const modeler = new BpmnModeler({
  connectorsExtension: {
    appendAnything: false
  }
});

// and the feature is gone

Why should we do it?

This allows us to roll it out across our toolstack in a safe manner.

[smbea]

Does something like 30d7603 make sense? I added a module that basically removes the create/append palette/contextpad entries if connectorsExtension.appendAnything is false but I'm not sure if this is a proper way to do it @nikku

[nikku]

@smbea Alternative to 30d7603 would be to filter out the entire module, based on the provided option:

CustomModeler.getModule = function(options) {
  const modules = super.getModules(options);
  
  if (options.connectorsExtension?.appendAnything === false) {
    modules = modules.without(CreateAppendAnythingModule);
  }

  return modules;
};

The third option would be to push an additional module that overrides named services exported by the module to empty stubs.

[smbea]

Wouldn't that first option mean having a new custom Modeler, that would need to be used instead of the Cloud Modeler? Not sure if I understood correctly

[nikku]

The first option would mean:

• BpmnViewer#getModules receives the options the instance is started with 1️⃣
• It can filter the modules at initialization time (rather than compile time), based on configuration passed.

If we want to go this route we need to extend the existing BaseViewer#getModules to accomplish 1️⃣. Alternative: Go any other route. But as we already have create-append-anything self-contained the best thing would be to not ship it completely, conditionally.

[smbea]

I redid this with 805318d. It follows what we do for alignToOrigin.

Maybe it's not exactly what you were mentioning but I think it achieves the same thing - don't add the module completely. Wdyt?

[nikku]

Good one. alignToOrigin is basically a hack that we need to use because we're missing #236 (comment). I'll see if we can follow up with a more reasonable approach: Simply allow Modeler#getModules to be subclassed.

[smbea]

My confusion was because getModules is only present in BaseViewer and not in Modeler. But looking forward to a follow up for this

[nikku]

My confusion was because getModules is only present in BaseViewer and not in Modeler. But looking forward to a follow up for this

The inheritance chain looks like this:

BaseViewer > Viewer > BaseModeler > Modeler

So any improvement in BaseViewer will be for the benefit of overall extensibility (all Viewer / Modeler variants).