Story for generic document factory

[fcollonval]

Problem

This was first brought at the JLab team meeting by @bollwyvl

Nick modified ipydrawio to support retrolab. This resulted in quite some hack to replace the file editor by the custom document from ipydrawio factory.

It will be nice if custom factories can be supported out of the box.

Proposed Solution

As retrolab is single document oriented set through URL, one idea could be to support generic URL pattern <baseURL>/retro/<factory name>/?path=<path>. This will support:

• multiple factories for the same path
• unique URL (that can be shared, saved,...)

The challenge is likely to be on the list of core plugins that need to be loaded on that page - we may need to support customization of the base modules in app/index.js, to change how core packages are distributed and to support dynamic plugin load.

[jtpio]

Thanks @fcollonval for opening this.

one idea could be to support generic URL pattern

Or maybe via a query string parameter such as ?factory=, so it also works with JupyterLite.

Probaby the doc manager plugin defined here could be slightly tweaked to open widgets with a different factory:

retrolab/packages/docmanager-extension/src/index.ts

Lines 17 to 48 in 3b9b2bb

	/**
	* A plugin to open document in a new browser tab.
	*
	* TODO: remove and use a custom doc manager?
	*/
	const opener: JupyterFrontEndPlugin<void> = {
	id: '@retrolab/docmanager-extension:opener',
	requires: [IDocumentManager],
	autoStart: true,
	activate: (app: JupyterFrontEnd, docManager: IDocumentManager) => {
	const baseUrl = PageConfig.getBaseUrl();
	// patch the `docManager.open` option to prevent the default behavior
	const docOpen = docManager.open;
	docManager.open = (
	path: string,
	widgetName = 'default',
	kernel?: Partial<Kernel.IModel>,
	options?: DocumentRegistry.IOpenOptions
	): IDocumentWidget | undefined => {
	const ref = options?.ref;
	if (ref === '_noref') {
	docOpen.call(docManager, path, widgetName, kernel, options);
	return;
	}
	const ext = PathExt.extname(path);
	const route = ext === '.ipynb' ? 'notebooks' : 'edit';
	window.open(`${baseUrl}retro/${route}/${path}`);
	return undefined;
	};
	}
	};

[bollwyvl]

Yeah... I don't know how much I care about pretty urls, but definitely do care about getting "free" lite support. And rise would be similar, I suppose. On video chat, I went down a similarly aggressive path, but with tree... That one _would_ make sense as a new url, as it has a server component. Settings is maybe like that. Of course we might be able to solve fancy retro urls at lite build time, if they can be predictably derived from package.json metadata...

[fcollonval]

query string parameter such as ?factory=, so it also works with JupyterLite

👍 to get Lite happier 😄

[meeseeksmachine]

This issue has been mentioned on Jupyter Community Forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/how-to-open-myst-markdown-on-retrolab-with-jupytext/12763/2

[jtpio]

Thinking about this more, we'll probably want to make it generic enough so it can open other arbitrary widgets in new browser tabs. For example the new settings editor.

[jtpio]

Just opened jupyter/notebook#6315 to start exploring this.

[jtpio]

Closing as fixed by jupyter/notebook#6315, which added initial support for this.

Let's continue in the Notebook repo with follow-up issues and PRs: https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/