Data Explorer: Multiple configurations

[dylanross3]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Some users want to be able to display multiple configurations of the Data Explorer for the same dataset. Currently, this requires outputting the DataFrame multiple times (in the same cell or multiple cells). Unfortunately, this approach duplicates the DataFrame schema/data, which bloats the notebook file. For larger datasets, this can cause the browser to struggle and significantly increases the load time of the notebook.

Describe the solution you'd like One lightweight solution would be to allow multiple configurations of the Data Explorer in a single execution output by keeping track of an array of metadata configurations instead of a single configuration.

{
  metadata: {
    dx: { view: "bar" }
  }
}

becomes

{
  metadata: {
    dx: [
      { view: "bar" },
      { view: "line" }
    ]
  }
}

When there are multiple configurations, the UI would render multiple instances of the Data Explorer component instead of just one. Each instance would be passed the corresponding metadata along with the original the data/schema. Presumably they would be layed out vertically similar to what happens when you output the same DataFrame multiple times, though some treatment could be applied to separate them visually.

In terms of how the user is able to provide multiple configurations, this could be achieved through UI controls to add/remove and re-order configurations. You could also simplify such that this is only allowed via the programmatic configuration (see nteract/nteract#4377), especially as an early milestone.

I imagine the Data Explorer component that exists today wouldn't need to change much, but an additional wrapping component would be introduced. This could be done in user land, but we would need to align on the metadata standard.

[stale[bot]]

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Thank you!

[captainsafia]

Moving this to the data-explorer repo.