[Datasets] Dataset representations don't work out-of-the-box on notebooks

[bveeramani]

What happened + What you expected to happen

On Google Colab:

At first, you get warning telling you to upgrade the ipywidgets version.

If you do that and then restart the runtime you get a new problem:

Support for third party widgets (widgets outside of the ipywidgets package) needs to be enabled separately. Support for these widgets will be loaded from a CDN external from Colab.

On Anyscale:

Instead of a readable output, you get HTML like VBox(children=(HTML(value='<h2>Dataset</h2>'), Tab(children=(HTML(value='<div class="scrollableTable jp-Render…:

Versions / Dependencies

Ray: master

Reproduction script

See above.

Issue Severity

Low: It annoys or frustrates me.

[bveeramani]

@peytondmurray do you happen to know how to fix this?

[peytondmurray]

I'm happy to take a look at this, but I'm not exactly sure what the issue is. It could be a problem displaying ipywidgets in google colab - I'll do some testing and report back.

[bveeramani]

Okay, sweet. Thanks!

[peytondmurray]

So this works just fine in JupyterLab locally with ray @ 6b081e9.

$ jupyter --version
Selected Jupyter core packages...
IPython          : 8.7.0
ipykernel        : 6.19.2
ipywidgets       : 8.0.4
jupyter_client   : 7.4.8
jupyter_core     : 5.1.0
jupyter_server   : 2.0.1
jupyterlab       : 3.5.1
nbclient         : 0.7.2
nbconvert        : 7.2.6
nbformat         : 5.7.0
notebook         : 6.5.2
qtconsole        : not installed
traitlets        : 5.7.1

This must be something with colab. Will continue investigating.

[peytondmurray]

Hmm, it's possible ipywidgets>=8 is unsupported: googlecolab/colabtools#3020 (comment). Sadly we don't support ipywidgets<8, so for now it seems there is a conflict.

[peytondmurray]

Quick update on this: I'm going to try to find a way to detect whether we're running in google colab, and disable the notebook integration if that's the case. Will open a PR in a bit 🦾

[bveeramani]

@peytondmurray does #32841 also fix the issue on Anyscale?

[peytondmurray]

@bveeramani I'm not sure - I wasn't aware that this was affecting Anyscale as well. Is there a way I can access an environment to test?

[amogkam]

I'm still seeing this issue on Anyscale even with ipywidgets>=8

VBox(children=(HTML(value='<h2>Dataset</h2>'), Tab(children=(HTML(value='<div class="scrollableTable jp-Render…

[peytondmurray]

@amogkam @bveeramani So in the process of working on this, I think I came across a separate bug which I've made a PR for in #34339. One question about this issue though - did you restart the jupyter server after installed ipywidgets? I know locally, at least, the fancy notebook repr won't show up after installing ipywidgets>=8 unless you restart the jupyter server first. I don't know much about Anyscale, but could you please confirm this fixes the issue locally?

I'm thinking at the minimum we should make a better error message for the user ipywidgets>=8 is not installed, because at the moment the message is not at all clear enough.

At the same time, I'll investigate ways we can check if a repr is being correctly displayed. If there's a way to check this at runtime, we might be able to display a more informative error message rather than this VBox.... junk.

[pcmoritz]

I've also been seeing this issue locally on my laptop with the latest Ray master and the ipython executable (in the shell).