Deprecation notice for the Data Viewer in Jupyter

[rebornix]

We are currently evaluating the deprecation of the current Data Viewer within Jupyter in favor of alternative solutions that are actively maintained by other teams or the community. Our primary considerations include accessibility, feature richness, and performance, aiming to provide users with the best possible experience for viewing data.

By deprecating the existing Data Viewer, we aim to streamline the focus of the Jupyter extension on its core functionalities. Simultaneously, we intend to provide a robust set of APIs, empowering the community to develop and integrate advanced data viewers seamlessly.

[DaveGuenther]

Hi Folks,

Hopefully this is the correct platform to ask this question, if not please re-direct me to a more appropriate forum. I use the open source code-server and just learned that the Data Viewer would be deprecated out of the Jupyter extension.

I rely on the Data Viewer to inspect pandas data frames in memory when debugging .py files such as pipeline scripts or Shiny apps (not .ipynb), and am not aware of any other mechanism to do this in code-server. There is a Data Wrangler extension for but isn't doesn't appear to be available for code-server (only VS Code Server?).

Can someone please let me know what other extensions can still do this in code-server after Data Viewer is deprecated?

Thanks!

[amunger]

Hi @DaveGuenther - that was one entry point we forgot about, but that one should also delegate to any extension that provides the appropriate data viewer (including Data Wrangler) by the next release.
Thanks for reaching out.

[DaveGuenther]

Thanks @amunger. When Data Wrangler is enhanced to include the capability to view data frames in memory during debug of a .py file, will the entry point be similar to the above screenshot? Essentially a menu option to Open/View in Data Wrangler when right-clicking or hovering on a data frame variable?

[amunger]

yes, the same context menu entry point will be used from the debug variables view.

[DaveGuenther]

Hi @amunger,

I should probably clarify that I'm running coder-server 4.89.1 (code 1.89.1), and connecting to it via web browser - not using VS Code Desktop App for this. Will the new version of Data Wrangler be able to work with the current version of code-server to get the "View Value in Data Viewer" functionality in web mode or will I need to also update code-server to a newer (future) version for the web functionality?

Thanks!

[amunger]

ah, sorry, didn't realize you were using a different product. Data Wrangler is only available the official vscode, The API's are available for another extension to cover this functionality though.

I'm also not sure what code-server gets you over just using remote development with vscode.dev.

[DRKV333]

Right, so as far as I can tell, by "alternative solutions that are actively maintained by other teams or the community" you just mean Microsoft's closed source "Data Wrangler Extension for Visual Studio Code". Correct me if I'm wrong, but there doesn't seem to be any other solution available, let alone an open source one.

I don't particularly care about "accessibility, feature richness, and performance", I just want to get a basic idea of what's in a data frame.

I feel like deprecating the simple, built-in, open source solution without making sure there is a similar alternative, effectively forcing people to use Data Wrangler, is really shitty. Could you at least split the built-in data viewer out into a separate extension, before obliterating it completely?