How would you implement a HITL task that allows selection of records?

[davikor]

I am currently trying to design a workflow that is about to remove old data from a database. There is one catch: the data contains a free text field that is mostly empty but in some rare cases contains data. Since I cannot reliably analyze this field to determine whether the record should be removed, I want to use a HITL operator to present the list of records and the contents of that field to a user so that the user can select the records for removal manually.

From what I have seen, I could use a HITLEntryOperator with multiselect enabled, but the presentation is not very good for this kind of selection, because the texts can be longer and in general I would prefer a table view with a row for each record for better overview. Also I need to present at least the id of the record along with the free text, and of course I could somehow concat these two into one string but I do not want to do this as long as I absolutely have to.

Alternatively I could simply use the HITLOperator and add a bool param for each record. This could work but I still miss the option to define a template and to provide more than just a string (e.g. the id, so I know what to delete later on)

The 3rd option I can imagine is to spawn a task instance of HITLApproveOperator for each record and then I could display all the information required for decision making cleanly. but I would still prefer to have a kind of an overview table where the user can select all records in one step.

My question is: is it possible to create a custom HITL operator with a custom template? I already inherited from the HITLOperator which obviously is possibly but I do not understand how to link a view or template to my custom operator and so I cannot really go on. Do you have a tutorial or is it documented somewhere (I already read the custom operator docs? Or do you have another idea how to go for this requirement with the existing set of operators?

TIA David

[potiuk]

I guess you should explore writing custom UI plugin for that.

[davikor]

thank you very much for the input. do you have any experience with this? from what I read in the docs plugins can define external views, but I can inject them only on a predefined set of fixed options, like an extra tab or a button. Using them as a replacement for hitl is not possible, right? The only option I see here is to implemetn a FastAPI Middlewares and then filter for the HITL ui requests and then send a complete custom ui (still not sure, how to handle the additional data in the (custom) hitl operator, though). Is this what you would suggest or am I missing something?