Report underlying HTTP requests for executed commands

[alopresto]

Description - Feature Proposal

I am proposing a new feature for NiPyAPI. Many times, when a user wants to know what REST API calls to execute to achieve a specific goal, we instruct them to use the UI and their browser's Developer Tools panel to monitor which API calls the UI client makes to the server. NiPyAPI exposes a number of these tasks, as well as providing convenience methods that recurse through process groups/components, etc. to make these operations even easier. It would be nice if the user could perform one or more operations via NiPyAPI and then have the series of API calls exported via a number of possible outputs.

Terminology

• operation - a single action executed by NiPyAPI. This could be one or more HTTP API requests to NiFi
• API request - an HTTP request made by the NiPyAPI client to the NiFi server
• curl - the curl command-line tool & library
• session - an individual interaction with the NiPyAPI command-line tool, which can contain 0 or more operations. Terminated when the client process is killed

"Ken Burns Mode" could be enabled in a variety of ways:

• Invoke NiPyAPI with a flag like --echoHttp so all operation(s) executed during a NiPyAPI session get echoed, in sequence, to a specific output
  • console output
  • could be piped to a separate output file
• When running in a NiPyAPI session, a specific operation could be invoked with a flag like --echoHttp to print the API request(s) associated with the single operation
  • A specific operation could be invoked with a flag like --dry-run in conjunction with the --echoHttp flag to print the API request that would be sent without actually sending it
• A curl compatibility mode could be enabled in any/all of the above scenarios to print the HTTP API request(s) in a form that could be copy/pasted to the command line and invoked via curl (i.e. headers are broken out into -H "X-Header-Name: headerValue" form)

Examples

• A normal example is getting the application status, which is a single operation in NiPyAPI and a single API call
• A complex example is getting the processors with sensitive properties, which I believe requires iterating over multiple components via an API call for each