SwanHelp

Help panel for SWAN

This extension adds the following to the 'Help' menu in the menubar

• About dialog
• Links to Community Forum, and Support portal
• A help panel that opens an iframe to the documentation website
• An 'Examples Gallery' panel that opens the notebook gallery website inside an iframe. The extension also allows downloading and opening notebooks in the gallery website directly inside the SWAN session.

This extension is composed of a Python package named swanhelp, which installs the nbextension and a NPM package named @swan-cern/swanhelp for the JupyterLab extension.

How the 'Examples Gallery' works

• The gallery panel allows browsing the SWAN Gallery website within an iframe and downloading notebooks into the SWAN session all from within the JupyterLab UI.

• On clicking download inside the iframe, javascript inside the iframe sends a message using window.postMessage() to the parent JupyterLab window.

• The JupyterLab extension handles this message and makes a request to the SwanContents API (/user/api/contents/download) with the URL of the notebook to download.

• The jupyter server downloads the notebook and on success the notebook is opened by the extension in a new tab in JupyterLab

Requirements

• JupyterLab >= 4.0.0

Install

To install the extension, execute:

pip install swanhelp

To enable the nbextension in the classic notebook ui (now renamed nbclassic):

jupyter nbclassic-extension install swanhelp --py
jupyter nbclassic-extension enable  swanhelp --py

Uninstall

To remove the extension, execute:

pip uninstall swanhelp

Contributing

Development install

Note: You will need NodeJS to build the extension package.

The jlpm command is JupyterLab's pinned version of yarn that is installed with JupyterLab. You may use yarn or npm in lieu of jlpm below.

# Clone the repo to your local environment
# Change directory to the swanhelp directory
# Install package in development mode
pip install -e "."
# Link your development version of the extension with JupyterLab
jupyter labextension develop . --overwrite
# Rebuild extension Typescript source after making changes
jlpm build

You can watch the source directory and run JupyterLab at the same time in different terminals to watch for changes in the extension's source and automatically rebuild the extension.

# Watch the source directory in one terminal, automatically rebuilding when needed
jlpm watch
# Run JupyterLab in another terminal
jupyter lab

With the watch command running, every saved change will immediately be built locally and available in your running JupyterLab. Refresh JupyterLab to load the change in your browser (you may need to wait several seconds for the extension to be rebuilt).

By default, the jlpm build command generates the source maps for this extension to make it easier to debug using the browser dev tools. To also generate source maps for the JupyterLab core extensions, you can run the following command:

jupyter lab build --minimize=False

Development uninstall

pip uninstall swanhelp

In development mode, you will also need to remove the symlink created by jupyter labextension develop command. To find its location, you can run jupyter labextension list to figure out where the labextensions folder is located. Then you can remove the symlink named @swan-cern/swanhelp within that folder.

Packaging the extension

See RELEASE