Problem Statement

Currently in Harness IDP (Backstage-based catalog), only a fixed set of fields are searchable and filterable in the UI.

Labels are highly restrictive (Kubernetes-style constraints), which prevents customers from using them for real-world identifiers such as canonical paths. While metadata supports flexible values, metadata fields:

Are not searchable

Are not filterable

Are not first-class citizens in the catalog UI by default

This limitation makes it difficult to discover and organize APIs and components at scale.

Customer Use Case

Customers need to associate meaningful identifiers such as a canonical API path, for example:

/benefits/investmentManagement/investmentPlanManagement/accruedTimeInvestmentDocumentManagement/document.read

Requirements:

The value must be visible in the API details view

The value must be searchable

The value must be filterable

The solution must work for multiple custom properties, not just one hardcoded field

Current Limitations

Labels

Restricted to [a-zA-Z0-9._-]

Max 63 characters

Cannot contain /

Not all label values are searchable

Annotations / Metadata

Flexible value support

Not searchable or filterable

Not indexed for discovery

Proposed Enhancement

Introduce a way to configure custom catalog fields (labels or metadata) as:

Searchable

Filterable

Displayable in the catalog UI

For example:

Allow customers to define which metadata. fields should be indexed

Allow admin-level configuration to mark fields as:

Search keys

Filter dimensions

Display columns

This avoids the need to request new product changes every time a new property needs to be searchable.