Enabling rendering on nbviewer by persisting state of anywidget in Jupyter Notebook

[andersy005]

@manzt and i have been experimenting with anywidget + @carbonplan/maps in https://github.com/manzt/carbonplan. The notebook works perfectly fine when connected to a live kernel. however, i am facing an issue with persisting the widget's state within the notebook and having external services like nbviewer render the initial state of the widget.

to illustrate the problem, i have shared a sample notebook at https://nbviewer.org/gist/andersy005/f8bca6c542135a75ab3e11203eada3a1. as you can observe, the last cell of the notebook is not being rendered.

any guidance on how to resolve this issue?

https://github.com/manzt/anywidget/assets/13301940/d4902396-7795-4de8-b37b-5a2a784b75bd

Cc @katamartin

[rgbkrk]

I'm a bit new to how widgets persist state in the notebook so for my own sake (and maybe others) I'm going to document what I see in the notebook. I can see the widget model in the output:

There is no other reference to the widget model in the source of the notebook and nothing for nbviewer to render (other than that text/plain entry).

When I try the simplest widget in JupyterLab, the IntSlider I'm also not seeing the persistence.

Cell:

from ipywidgets import IntSlider
islide = IntSlider()
islide

Notebook:

{
 "cells": [
  {
   "cell_type": "code",
   "execution_count": 5,
   "id": "088fffff-0cb1-4055-a722-2635371d3be1",
   "metadata": {},
   "outputs": [
    {
     "data": {
      "application/vnd.jupyter.widget-view+json": {
       "model_id": "9480df1fa4f04356873a4969ef4038c4",
       "version_major": 2,
       "version_minor": 0
      },
      "text/plain": [
       "IntSlider(value=0)"
      ]
     },
     "execution_count": 5,
     "metadata": {},
     "output_type": "execute_result"
    }
   ],
   "source": [
    "from ipywidgets import IntSlider\n",
    "islide = IntSlider()\n",
    "islide"
   ]
  }
 ],
 "metadata": {
  "kernelspec": {
   "display_name": "Python 3 (ipykernel)",
   "language": "python",
   "name": "python3"
  },
  "language_info": {
   "codemirror_mode": {
    "name": "ipython",
    "version": 3
   },
   "file_extension": ".py",
   "mimetype": "text/x-python",
   "name": "python",
   "nbconvert_exporter": "python",
   "pygments_lexer": "ipython3",
   "version": "3.11.1"
  }
 },
 "nbformat": 4,
 "nbformat_minor": 5
}

If I recall correctly, the classic notebook had a "Save Widget State" button. I don't have that in JupyterLab.

[rgbkrk]

It looks like there's a setting that has to be enabled in JupyterLab to automatically save widget state

After doing that and also making sure to update my jupyterlab and ipywidgets installation, I restarted JupyterLab and see a big pile of state:

{
 "cells": [
  {
   "cell_type": "code",
   "execution_count": 1,
   "id": "088fffff-0cb1-4055-a722-2635371d3be1",
   "metadata": {},
   "outputs": [
    {
     "data": {
      "application/vnd.jupyter.widget-view+json": {
       "model_id": "03a522b9129949d8ae7a802b0f344980",
       "version_major": 2,
       "version_minor": 0
      },
      "text/plain": [
       "IntSlider(value=0)"
      ]
     },
     "execution_count": 1,
     "metadata": {},
     "output_type": "execute_result"
    }
   ],
   "source": [
    "from ipywidgets import IntSlider\n",
    "islide = IntSlider()\n",
    "islide"
   ]
  }
 ],
 "metadata": {
  "kernelspec": {
   "display_name": "Python 3 (ipykernel)",
   "language": "python",
   "name": "python3"
  },
  "language_info": {
   "codemirror_mode": {
    "name": "ipython",
    "version": 3
   },
   "file_extension": ".py",
   "mimetype": "text/x-python",
   "name": "python",
   "nbconvert_exporter": "python",
   "pygments_lexer": "ipython3",
   "version": "3.11.1"
  },
  "widgets": {
   "application/vnd.jupyter.widget-state+json": {
    "state": {
     "03a522b9129949d8ae7a802b0f344980": {
      "model_module": "@jupyter-widgets/controls",
      "model_module_version": "2.0.0",
      "model_name": "IntSliderModel",
      "state": {
       "behavior": "drag-tap",
       "layout": "IPY_MODEL_1db186f70ff646aea16422745dea7a8b",
       "style": "IPY_MODEL_30cb35a482a54c17a2173a45376f43ea",
       "value": 85
      }
     },
     "1db186f70ff646aea16422745dea7a8b": {
      "model_module": "@jupyter-widgets/base",
      "model_module_version": "2.0.0",
      "model_name": "LayoutModel",
      "state": {}
     },
     "30cb35a482a54c17a2173a45376f43ea": {
      "model_module": "@jupyter-widgets/controls",
      "model_module_version": "2.0.0",
      "model_name": "SliderStyleModel",
      "state": {
       "description_width": ""
      }
     }
    },
    "version_major": 2,
    "version_minor": 0
   }
  }
 },
 "nbformat": 4,
 "nbformat_minor": 5
}

However, that doesn't render in notebook viewer. https://nbviewer.org/gist/rgbkrk/d11992979381414b32d18b16be2d64cf

I've been away from working on nbviewer and nbconvert so I don't know how it takes the widget state into account.

[manzt]

However, that doesn't render in notebook viewer. nbviewer.org/gist/rgbkrk/d11992979381414b32d18b16be2d64cf

I'm not sure how nbviewer is implemented, but nbconvert works for rendering widgets to HTML. https://github.com/flekschas/jupyter-scatter/issues/81#issuecomment-1638951995

If you nbconvert --execute the notebook, it will embed the widget model state, otherwise you'll need to make sure the model state is embedded (i.e., "Save Widget State Automatically" in JupyterLab).

For clarity, @andersy005 this is not an issue with anywidget, but Jupyter Widgets (standard ipywidgets do not render in nbviewer either, thanks to @rgbkrk example). But thank you @rgbkrk for the exploration, and maybe we can at least figure out if this is unexpected or expected behavior!

[andersy005]

@rgbkrk / @manzt, thank you for looking into this and suggesting workarounds. i was able to convert the executed notebook to HTML and then served it from an s3 bucket: https://carbonplan-share.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/leap-demo.html

and it appears to be working: initial states of the widgets are captured as expected

[manzt]

Awesome! @andersy005 if you use ipywidgets.jslink instead of ipywidgets.link you can also link the inputs on the client side (i.e., sliders and dropdowns will still work in the HTML-only version).

import ipywidgets

colormap = ipywidgets.Dropdown(options=["warm", "fire", "water"])
clim = ipywidgets.FloatRangeSlider(min=-20, max=30)
opacity = ipywidgets.FloatSlider(min=0, max=1, step=0.001)
region = ipywidgets.Checkbox(description="Region")

-- ipywidgets.link((map_widget, "colormap"), (colormap, "value"))
-- ipywidgets.link((map_widget, "clim"), (clim, "value"))
-- ipywidgets.link((map_widget, "opacity"), (opacity, "value"))
-- ipywidgets.link((map_widget, "region"), (region, "value"))
++ ipywidgets.jslink((map_widget, "colormap"), (colormap, "value"))
++ ipywidgets.jslink((map_widget, "clim"), (clim, "value"))
++ ipywidgets.jslink((map_widget, "opacity"), (opacity, "value"))
++ ipywidgets.jslink((map_widget, "region"), (region, "value"))

ipywidgets.VBox([
    ipywidgets.HBox([colormap, opacity, clim]),
    region,
    map_widget,
])

[andersy005]

thank you very much, @manzt! the jslink changes work :) with the exception of any selection widgets (dropdown, radiobuttons, select, etc), and this appears to be a well known issue upstream:

• https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/issues/2382

however, i'm satisfied with dropping the dropdown widget for the time being: https://carbonplan-share.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/leap-demo.html

[manzt]

Great! I'm going to mark this issue as resolved!

[manzt]

Ah, actually realizing this doesn't address that things don't seem to be working in nbviewer. Still need to look into that, but it doesn't seem like any widgets render with nbviewer.

[manzt]

Seems related:

• https://github.com/jupyter/nbviewer/issues/987