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Embrasing web standards

One of the main reason that allowed us to developp the current notebook web application was to embrase the web technology.

By beeing a pure web application using HTML, Javascript and CSS, the Notebook can get all the web technology improvement for free. Thus, as browsers support for different media extend, The notebook web app should be able to be compatible without modification.

This is also true with performance of the User Interface as the speed of javascript VM increase.

The other advantage of using only web technology is that the code of the interface is fully accessible to the end user, and modifiable live. Even if this task is not always easy, we strive to keep our code as accessible and reusable as possible. This should allow with minimum effort to develop small extensions that customize the behavior of the web interface.

Tempering with Notebook app

The first tool that is availlable to you and that you shoudl be aware of are browser “developpers tool”. The exact naming can change across browser, and might require the installation of extensions. But basically they can allow you to inspect/modify the DOM, and interact with the javascript code that run the frontend.

  • In Chrome and safari Developper tools are in the menu [Put mmenu name in english here]
  • In firefox you might need to install Firebug
  • others ?

Those will be your best friends to debug and try different approach for your extensions.

Injecting JS

using magics

Above tools can be tedious to edit long javascipt files. Hopefully we provide the %%javascript magic. This allows you to quickly inject javascript into the notebook. Still the javascript injected this way will not survive reloading. Hence it is a good tool for testing an refinig a script.

You might see here and there people modifying css and injecting js into notebook by reading file and publishing them into the notebook. Not only this often break the flow of the notebook and make the re-execution of the notebook broken, but it also mean that you need to execute those cells on all the notebook every time you need to update the code.

This can still be usefull in some cases, like the %autosave magic that allows to control the time between each save. But this can be replaced by a Javascript dropdown menu to select save interval.

## you can inspect the autosave code to see what it does.
%autosave??

custom.js

To inject Javascript we provide an entry point: custom.js that allow the user to execute and load other resources into the notebook. Javascript code in custom.js will be executed when the notebook app start and can then be used to customise almost anything in the UI and in the behavior of the notebook.

custom.js can be found in the Jupyter dir. You can share your custom.js with others.

Back to theory
import os.path
profile_dir = '~/.jupyter'
profile_dir = os.path.expanduser(profile_dir)
profile_dir

and custom js is in

import os.path
custom_js_path = os.path.join(profile_dir,'custom','custom.js')

#  my custom js
if os.path.isfile(custom_js_path):
    with open(custom_js_path) as f:
        for l in f:
            print(l)
else:
    print("You don't have a custom.js file")

Note that custom.js is ment to be modified by user, when writing a script, you can define it in a separate file and add a line of configuration into custom.js that will fetch and execute the file.

Warning : even if modification of custom.js take effect immediately after browser refresh (except if browser cache is aggressive), creating a file in static/ directory need a server restart.

Exercise :

  • Create a custom.js in the right location with the following content:

    alert("hello world from custom.js")

  • Restart your server and open any notebook.

  • Be greeted by custom.js

Have a look at default custom.js, to see it’s content and some more explanation.

We’ve seen above that you can change the autosave rate by using a magic. This is typically something I don’t want to type everytime, and that I don’t like to embed into my workwlow and documents. (reader don’t care what my autosave time is), let’s build an extension that allow to do it.

Create a dropdow elemement in the toolbar (DOM Jupyter.toolbar.element), you will need

  • IPython.notebook.set_autosave_interval(miliseconds)
  • know that 1min = 60 sec, and 1 sec = 1000 ms
var label = jQuery('<label/>').text('AutoScroll Limit:');
var select = jQuery('<select/>')
     //.append(jQuery('<option/>').attr('value', '2').text('2min (default)'))
     .append(jQuery('<option/>').attr('value', undefined).text('disabled'))

     // TODO:
     //the_toolbar_element.append(label)
     //the_toolbar_element.append(select);

select.change(function() {
     var val = jQuery(this).val() // val will be the value in [2]
     // TODO
     // this will be called when dropdown changes

});

var time_m = [1,5,10,15,30];
for (var i=0; i < time_m.length; i++) {
     var ts = time_m[i];
                                          //[2]   ____ this will be `val` on [1]
                                          //     |
                                          //     v
     select.append($('<option/>').attr('value', ts).text(thr+'min'));
     // this will fill up the dropdown `select` with
     // 1 min
     // 5 min
     // 10 min
     // 10 min
     // ...
}

I like my cython to be nicely highlighted

IPython.config.cell_magic_highlight['magic_text/x-cython'] = {}
IPython.config.cell_magic_highlight['magic_text/x-cython'].reg = [/^%%cython/]

text/x-cython is the name of CodeMirror mode name, magic_ prefix will just patch the mode so that the first line that contains a magic does not screw up the highlighting. regis a list or regular expression that will trigger the change of mode.

Sadly you will have to read the js source file (but there are lots of comments) an/or build the javascript documentation using yuidoc. If you have node and yui-doc installed:

$ cd ~/jupyter/notebook/notebook/static/notebook/js/
$ yuidoc . --server
warn: (yuidoc): Failed to extract port, setting to the default :3000
info: (yuidoc): Starting YUIDoc@0.3.45 using YUI@3.9.1 with NodeJS@0.10.15
info: (yuidoc): Scanning for yuidoc.json file.
info: (yuidoc): Starting YUIDoc with the following options:
info: (yuidoc):
{ port: 3000,
  nocode: false,
  paths: [ '.' ],
  server: true,
  outdir: './out' }
info: (yuidoc): Scanning for yuidoc.json file.
info: (server): Starting server: http://127.0.0.1:3000

and browse http://127.0.0.1:3000 to get docs

By browsing the doc you will see that we have soem convenience methods that avoid to re-invent the UI everytime :

Jupyter.toolbar.add_buttons_group([
        {
             'label'   : 'run qtconsole',
             'icon'    : 'icon-terminal', // select your icon from
                                          // http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/
             'callback': function(){IPython.notebook.kernel.execute('%qtconsole')}
        }
        // add more button here if needed.
        ]);

with a lot of icons you can select from.

Cell Metadata

The most requested feature is generaly to be able to distinguish individual cell in th enotebook, or run specific action with them. To do so, you can either use Jupyter.notebook.get_selected_cell(), or rely on CellToolbar. This allow you to register aset of action and graphical element that will be attached on individual cells.

Cell Toolbar

You can see some example of what can be done by toggling the Cell Toolbar selector in the toolbar on top of the notebook. It provide two default presets that are Default and slideshow. Default allow edit the metadata attached to each cell manually.

First we define a function that takes at first parameter an element on the DOM in which to inject UI element. Second element will be the cell this element will be registerd with. Then we will need to register that function ad give it a name.

Register a callback

%%javascript
var CellToolbar = Jupyter.CellToolbar
var toggle =  function(div, cell) {
     var button_container = $(div)

     // let's create a button that show the  current value of the metadata
     var button = $('<button/>').addClass('btn btn-mini').text(String(cell.metadata.foo));

     // On click, change the metadata value and update the button label
     button.click(function(){
                 var v = cell.metadata.foo;
                 cell.metadata.foo = !v;
                 button.text(String(!v));
             })

     // add the button to the DOM div.
     button_container.append(button);
}

 // now we register the callback under the name foo to give the
 // user the ability to use it later
 CellToolbar.register_callback('tuto.foo', toggle);

Registering a preset

This function can now be part of many preset of the CellToolBar.

%%javascript
Jupyter.CellToolbar.register_preset('Tutorial 1',['tuto.foo','default.rawedit'])
Jupyter.CellToolbar.register_preset('Tutorial 2',['slideshow.select','tuto.foo'])

You should now have access to two presets :

  • Tutorial 1
  • Tutorial 2

And check that the buttons you defin share state when you toggle preset. Check moreover that the metadata of the cell is modified when you clisk the button, and that when saved on reloaded the metadata is still availlable.

Exercise:

Try to wrap the all code in a file, put this file in {profile}/static/custom/<a-name>.js, and add

require(['custom/<a-name>']);

in custom.js to have this script automatically loaded in all your notebooks.

require is provided by a javascript library that allow to express dependency. For simple extension like the previous one we directly mute the global namespace, but for more complexe extension you could pass acallback to require([...], <callback>) call, to allow the user to pass configuration information to your plugin.

In Python lang,

require(['a/b', 'c/d'], function( e, f){
    e.something()
    f.something()
})

could be read as

import a.b as e
import c.d as f
e.something()
f.something()

See for example @damianavila [“ZenMode” plugin](https://github.com/ipython-contrib/IPython-notebook-extensions/blob/master/custom.example.js#L34) :

// read that as
// import custom.zenmode.main as zenmode
require(['custom/zenmode/main'],function(zenmode){
    zenmode.background('images/back12.jpg');
})

For the quickest

Try to use the following to bind a dropdown list to cell.metadata.difficulty.select.

It should be able to take the 4 following values :

  • <None>
  • Easy
  • Medium
  • Hard

We will use it to customise the output of the converted notebook depending of the tag on each cell

%load soln/celldiff.js

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