.. _contents_api: Contents API ============ .. currentmodule:: notebook.services.contents The Jupyter Notebook web application provides a graphical interface for creating, opening, renaming, and deleting files in a virtual filesystem. The :class:`~manager.ContentsManager` class defines an abstract API for translating these interactions into operations on a particular storage medium. The default implementation, :class:`~filemanager.FileContentsManager`, uses the local filesystem of the server for storage and straightforwardly serializes notebooks into JSON. Users can override these behaviors by supplying custom subclasses of ContentsManager. This section describes the interface implemented by ContentsManager subclasses. We refer to this interface as the **Contents API**. Data Model ---------- .. currentmodule:: notebook.services.contents.manager Filesystem Entities ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .. _notebook models: ContentsManager methods represent virtual filesystem entities as dictionaries, which we refer to as **models**. Models may contain the following entries: +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ | Key | Type |Info | +====================+===========+==============================+ |**name** |unicode |Basename of the entity. | +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ |**path** |unicode |Full | | | |(:ref:`API-style`) | | | |path to the entity. | +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ |**type** |unicode |The entity type. One of | | | |``"notebook"``, ``"file"`` or | | | |``"directory"``. | +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ |**created** |datetime |Creation date of the entity. | +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ |**last_modified** |datetime |Last modified date of the | | | |entity. | +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ |**content** |variable |The "content" of the entity. | | | |(:ref:`See | | | |Below`) | +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ |**mimetype** |unicode or |The mimetype of ``content``, | | |``None`` |if any. (:ref:`See | | | |Below`) | +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ |**format** |unicode or |The format of ``content``, | | |``None`` |if any. (:ref:`See | | | |Below`) | +--------------------+-----------+------------------------------+ .. _modelcontent: Certain model fields vary in structure depending on the ``type`` field of the model. There are three model types: **notebook**, **file**, and **directory** . - ``notebook`` models - The ``format`` field is always ``"json"``. - The ``mimetype`` field is always ``None``. - The ``content`` field contains a :class:`nbformat.notebooknode.NotebookNode` representing the .ipynb file represented by the model. See the `NBFormat`_ documentation for a full description. - ``file`` models - The ``format`` field is either ``"text"`` or ``"base64"``. - The ``mimetype`` field is ``text/plain`` for text-format models and ``application/octet-stream`` for base64-format models. - The ``content`` field is always of type ``unicode``. For text-format file models, ``content`` simply contains the file's bytes after decoding as UTF-8. Non-text (``base64``) files are read as bytes, base64 encoded, and then decoded as UTF-8. - ``directory`` models - The ``format`` field is always ``"json"``. - The ``mimetype`` field is always ``None``. - The ``content`` field contains a list of :ref:`content-free` models representing the entities in the directory. .. note:: .. _contentfree: In certain circumstances, we don't need the full content of an entity to complete a Contents API request. In such cases, we omit the ``mimetype``, ``content``, and ``format`` keys from the model. This most commonly occurs when listing a directory, in which circumstance we represent files within the directory as content-less models to avoid having to recursively traverse and serialize the entire filesystem. **Sample Models** .. sourcecode:: python # Notebook Model with Content { 'content': { 'metadata': {}, 'nbformat': 4, 'nbformat_minor': 0, 'cells': [ { 'cell_type': 'markdown', 'metadata': {}, 'source': 'Some **Markdown**', }, ], }, 'created': datetime(2015, 7, 25, 19, 50, 19, 19865), 'format': 'json', 'last_modified': datetime(2015, 7, 25, 19, 50, 19, 19865), 'mimetype': None, 'name': 'a.ipynb', 'path': 'foo/a.ipynb', 'type': 'notebook', 'writable': True, } # Notebook Model without Content { 'content': None, 'created': datetime.datetime(2015, 7, 25, 20, 17, 33, 271931), 'format': None, 'last_modified': datetime.datetime(2015, 7, 25, 20, 17, 33, 271931), 'mimetype': None, 'name': 'a.ipynb', 'path': 'foo/a.ipynb', 'type': 'notebook', 'writable': True } API Paths ~~~~~~~~~ .. _apipaths: ContentsManager methods represent the locations of filesystem resources as **API-style paths**. Such paths are interpreted as relative to the root directory of the notebook server. For compatibility across systems, the following guarantees are made: * Paths are always ``unicode``, not ``bytes``. * Paths are not URL-escaped. * Paths are always forward-slash (/) delimited, even on Windows. * Leading and trailing slashes are stripped. For example, ``/foo/bar/buzz/`` becomes ``foo/bar/buzz``. * The empty string (``""``) represents the root directory. Writing a Custom ContentsManager -------------------------------- The default ContentsManager is designed for users running the notebook as an application on a personal computer. It stores notebooks as .ipynb files on the local filesystem, and it maps files and directories in the Notebook UI to files and directories on disk. It is possible to override how notebooks are stored by implementing your own custom subclass of ``ContentsManager``. For example, if you deploy the notebook in a context where you don't trust or don't have access to the filesystem of the notebook server, it's possible to write your own ContentsManager that stores notebooks and files in a database. Required Methods ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A minimal complete implementation of a custom :class:`~manager.ContentsManager` must implement the following methods: .. autosummary:: ContentsManager.get ContentsManager.save ContentsManager.delete_file ContentsManager.rename_file ContentsManager.file_exists ContentsManager.dir_exists ContentsManager.is_hidden Customizing Checkpoints ----------------------- TODO: Testing ------- .. currentmodule:: notebook.services.contents.tests :mod:`notebook.services.contents.tests` includes several test suites written against the abstract Contents API. This means that an excellent way to test a new ContentsManager subclass is to subclass our tests to make them use your ContentsManager. .. note:: PGContents_ is an example of a complete implementation of a custom ``ContentsManager``. It stores notebooks and files in PostgreSQL_ and encodes directories as SQL relations. PGContents also provides an example of how to re-use the notebook's tests. .. _NBFormat: http://nbformat.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html .. _PGContents: https://github.com/quantopian/pgcontents .. _PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org/