Use name not tags for unique cell objects about papermill

[ewmassey]

I really like this and strongly prefer it to our current strategy. How do you set a name for a cell in Jupyter?

[rgbkrk]

OMG, there's a name metadata field? Holy crap, I probably would have abused that in nteract to put in UUIDs. 😲 Then I'd be able to support commenting and other niceties really easily.

[rgbkrk]

As @mpacer points out, there's no way to set this with the current Jupyter UI. We'd need to introduce something into the classic notebook (as well as nteract).

Adding it on to the contextual cell menu is one <li> and some state management away.

It's tempting!

[rgbkrk]

I'm really interested in setting the name field using our current unique IDs and allowing users to override them with their own names (like parameters in this case).

[rgbkrk]

For classic, we need to make an extension for this. Are there JS APIs for managing the uniqueness of cell names in jupyter/notebook @mpacer?

[mpacer]

I don't think there is anything for maintaining uniqueness.

Note to fully support this requires modifying all of the cell creation machinery.

E.g., name metadata shouldn't be included in the duplicate of a cell once it's copied and pasted.

Name shouldn't persist on both cells after a split, perhaps it should be removed on both.

Merge should probably remove the name altogether.

Can you think of anything else?

[mpacer]

Aside: @rgbkrk I'd love to see how you get these demo visualisations to work so quickly.

It might be nice to have a little tab off to the left part of the top of the cell bar that displays the name that can be double clicked to edit (like the name of the document).

If I knew how to build a prototype so quickly I'd just have done it, rather than describe it (which is why I ask).

[rgbkrk]

I'd love to see how you get these demo visualisations to work so quickly.

Sometimes I'll cheat and just modify things on the DOM directly. In the case of this one, I hit command-shift-f in Atom (on nteract/nteract) to search across all files and typed in "Convert to Markdown" so that I could find where similar menu items were. I then copied the <li> React element from one of these other menu items and changed the text to match "Denote as Parameter Cell".

The reason I get it done quickly in nteract is mostly because of how our dev setup works and because I know the code base/tooling really well. I'd be happy to walk you through it!

[rgbkrk]

It might be nice to have a little tab off to the left part of the top of the cell bar that displays the name that can be double clicked to edit (like the name of the document).

I can tell I'm not going to like that, let me give it a go though. 😄

[rgbkrk]

Referencing an old issue for something similar for top level metadata: nteract/nteract#1503

[MSeal]

Going to close this issue as it's been more established that tags are the way to go for now on this topic.