Command to "Run cells in section" for current cell's section in notebook.

[asford]

Searched for "Run cells in section", had filed as https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-jupyter/issues/15501, maybe it belongs here.

The new "Run cells in section" feature is fantastic for organizing notebooks, particularly where you may have a section of "heavy IO" before a block of EDA or interactive analysis.

We often have notebooks with two sections:

1. A "data load" block that loads data from a backend warehouse, potentially running some expensive post-processing.
2. A "analysis" block, where we reshape the data, define some helper functions and run some lighter post-processing or tidy the dataset.

The "run in section" feature is great inside an analysis block, because we can easily rerun the lightweight helper definitions and generate EDA plots without triggering the heavier IO section of the notebook. Wow! Much rapid feedback. Much workflow ease. Nice.

However, unlike the (also great) "Run Precedent Cells" feature, there doesn't appear to be a way to trigger this from the command palette (and therefor keyboard shortcut) for the selected cell or section.

It would be good to add a editor command "Execute Section Cells"...

...selectable by the standard command palette ...targetable by keyboard shortcuts ...(ideally) in the extended run dropdown

...that detects the section of the currently selected cell or cells ...then runs the entire section (or sections) in the needful way (as if I clicked this on the section header in outline)

Examples of where in the UI I would expect this to show up...

I noted, in the keyboard shortcuts section, notebook.section.runCells, however this doesn't appear to have an effect when bound to a key.

[amunger]

Doesn't jupyter.runcurrentcell do this? The command name doesn't suggest it, but when I press ctrl+enter or shift+enter with multiple cells selected, those cells are run.

[asford]

Yes, you're correct that that command has those semantics and runs multiple selected cells.

The specific ask here is to lift the "run cells in section" command, which is currently only exposed as a dropdown from the outline view.

In to a command that will (conceptually):

• Get the enclosing section of the currently selected cell.
• Collect all the cells in that section.
• Execute all the cells in that section.

I think this is probably equivalent to adding a command that will:

• Identify the enclosing section(s) header for the currently selected cell(s).
• Execute the "Run Cells in Section" logic on those sections.

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Happy Coding!