Newbie finds naming snobbish

Dash Python
21

To Nic’s point above, is the naming for update_output_div confusing too?

If so, to Nic’s point, we could use a standard name like:

def update(city):

I don’t want to call this def callback because of the incidental naming issue I brought up earlier.

22

I agree - def update(city): is even better!

Just curious - My example would require Dash v 1.16 for the simplified callback syntax and at least Python 3.6 for the f string. Do you typically put examples in the docs that requires people to have the latest versions installed?

23

I think we’ll start introducing the simplified callback syntax within the next month with a little warning / note below some of the examples. That’ll give folks a few months to upgrade.

For Python 3 vs 2, we try to make our examples work in Python 2 & 3 for now. Python 2 was about 10% of our install base earlier this year, but it’s rapidly dropped within the last 2 months (https://pypistats.org/packages/dash).

24

After reading the great ideas here, I wanted to provide one more angle on the naming / specification of input values for callbacks.

While I support the effort to make things more easy to learn and understand the first time, the new way to access values, that you suggested @chriddyp, would make things very difficult for me.

We are not using fixed, static IDs, but rather rely on variables that store IDs. This helps us organize and structure our dashboards into smaller modules that can and will be reused. Additionally, we keep most of the IDs in one place and do not have to deal with duplicated IDs.

For us, a typical callback would look like:

@dash.callback(
    Output(dashboard_ids["figure"], "figure"),
    [
        Input(dashboard_ids["input1"], "value"),
        Input(dashboard_ids["input2"], "value"),
    ],
)
def update(value1, value2):
  pass

When we then want to access the value of our first input, we would need to write:

kwargs[f"{dashboard_ids['input1']}.value"]

This is in most cases very bloated and I would definitely need to save this to a temporary variable.