FlowDrop Workflow Specification 1.0-draft

A processor's exposure suggestion is authoring input only

A processor may suggest that a port ship hidden. That suggestion is consumed once, when a node type's exposure values are first written, and never again, so a consumer reading a node type's published metadata is reading decisions, not suggestions.

The rule

Normative: this is the rule
  1. The x-exposed-by-default schema extension is consumed at authoring time only: when seeding an author's exposure controls, and when a node type's stored exposure values are first derived from a processor's schema.
  2. It must never be consulted when a workflow runs, and no execution-time decision may depend on it.
  3. Published node metadata reports exposure as it stands in the node type's stored configuration (EXPO-7), never a processor's own suggestion; a processor declaring the extension therefore cannot change what an already-configured node type publishes.

What it means

A processor's exposure suggestion is read exactly once: when a node type is first derived from it. After that read, the suggestion is inert — changing the processor's schema later does not change what an already-derived node type publishes, because nothing at execution or publication time goes back to ask the processor again. What a node type reports is always its own stored decision (EXPO-7), never a live read of the processor.

Example

A processor's schema offers no opinion on one port and asks for the other to ship hidden.

The processor's own schema for two of its ports
{ "visible_in": { "type": "string" }, "hidden_in": { "type": "string", "x-exposed-by-default": false } }
What the node type stores for hidden_in, once, at derivationhidden
{ "exposed_by_default": false }

visible_in gets no such key at all — the derivation writes the flag only where it diverges from exposed. From that point on, a change to the processor's own schema reaches neither entry.

Rule identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered. Each implementation publishes its own standing against these rules; this specification does not.spec 1.0-draft · EXPO-6 · changed in spec 1.0