The new Form feature in Google Colaboratory

Question

Can someone explain or give a notebook example how to use the new Form feature? It looks really exciting, but I cannot find any example or even an announcement anyw

Answer 1

It's a useful and simple features to input values in Colab notebooks, still not described in Colab documentation.

For example I have a notebook to run instance segmentation of an image. To specify image url, before I had to modify a python variable like this:

image_url = 'http://example.com/image.jpg'

Now I can make a user friendly form field ("+field" button) with values:

• Variable name = image_url
• Variable type = string
• Form field type = input

Then switch to form visualization (dropdown near "+field" button) to visualize only form during notebook execution.

Answer 2

Here are all the possible types:

var_int    = 15           #@param {type:"integer"}
var_float  = 0.36         #@param {type:"number"}
var_bool   = False        #@param {type:"boolean"}
var_date   = "2018-10-21" #@param {type:"date"}
var_str    = "str"        #@param {type:"string"}
var_raw    = "raw"        #@param {type:"raw"}

var_slider = 39           #@param {type:"slider", min:0, max:100, step:1}
var_enum   = "val1"       #@param ["val1", "val2", "val3"]

The types are pretty self-explanatory.

Answer 3

Exciting feature indeed. It seems we can use checkboxes and date fields:

boolean_checkbox = True #@param {type:"boolean"}
date_input = '2018-03-22' #@param {type:"date"}

but I would really love to be able to construct dropdown lists using existing variables. Currently this seems limited:

dropdown = '1st option' #@param ["1st option", "2nd option", "3rd option"]

To be clear I'd love to be able to write

countries = df['country'][0] #@param df.country.unique()

Anyone?

Answer 4

Now there is an official example here:

https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/forms.ipynb

Answer 5

It seems to be an in-development feature. I noticed it a couple of days ago, on a refraction doc I was using in-class with students, and assumed it was because I'd imported matplolib, which I've not had reason to do before.

I reloaded the doc later to have a closer look, but the 'form' and 'field' buttons had disappeared from the mouseover menu.

I know I was not dreaming because the

@title

attribute was still there!

I just opened an unrelated student doc now to mark it and the additional menu items are there. No matplotlib in this doc, just basic Python.