[IPython-dev] Widget idea: Global Parameters

[Jacob Biesinger]

Hi!

I don't follow this list very closely but had an idea I thought worth
sharing.  I'm not sure if this is the right list to share to but here goes:

I find myself creating notebooks as reports on different datasets and
parameters.  There are a few global variables listed at the top and after
the code munging phase is complete, I make duplicates of the notebook, only
changing the global variables and rerunning all the cells.  This quickly
becomes unmanageable.  Additional notebooks are hard to maintain and tweak
whereas maintaining a single notebook means I have to rerun the report for
every tweak. I also can't compare reports without copying notebooks.

What if we had a way to specify "report parameters", global variables you
can modify using a widget interface (dropdown, slider, input box, etc but
tied to multiple cells or possibly the whole notebook) and a caching
mechanism to store notebook contents for each combination of report
parameters? I'm imagining quickly switching the dataset for a series of
graphs I'm looking at and having the graphs already cached for the ones
I've looked at, or having the report run for any new combinations.

I suppose I could open multiple tabs on the same report to simulate some of
this though it seems the autosaves would conflict.

Thanks for listening!
--
Jake Biesinger
Graduate Student
Xie Lab, UC Irvine
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