Ipywidgets: Adding a file selection widget

[deeplook]

I was looking for a "file selection widget", basically a Text field that would open an OS-specific file selection dialog and return the path of the selected file as a string value. I could not find that. Is that because it doesn't exist? And if so, would this be possible/doable? I'm not sure how this could be done in some OS-independant way, though.

[andymcarter]

I have used this gist as a basis for developing similar widgets in the past, I am not hugely familiar with tkinter but managed to get something to achieve what you need.

https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/162920/file-selection-button-for-jupyter-notebook

I ended up linking together this button and a text field to display the returned filename.

[deeplook]

@andymcarter i've just tested this on macOS and JupyterLab. I get a Python process started with a file selection dialog, but it's not immediately in the foreground and will not close after selecting files. So I have to kill it. Also, I'm totally not sure Tk is the way to go... ;)

[soerendip]

It works well, but only for local notebooks. It does not work when the notebook runs remotely. And for remote files.

[motin]

I'm not sure how this could be done in some OS-independant way, though.

Here is an existing OS-independent implementation: https://pypi.org/project/ipyfilechooser/

[keatonb]

There's something similar implemented already as FileUpload that returns the contents of the file. Would it be straightforward to make a version of this that just returns the path to the file? Would be great to be able to make another similar dialog box pop up for saving a file, where you can navigate to a path and select or name the file to save to. I have not found the Tk solutions to play nice with ipy notebooks on as Mac.

[Jhsmit]

I'm looking for something similar, I want to make a locally running Voila app and I'd like to have a widget that lets the user specify a folder or file where I can access the full path.

[scolobs]

I've been trying to do this too