Allow extensions to call cell commands with cell arguments

[DonJayamanne]

In the Python notebook we have commands to run

• Current cell and all below
• All cells above current cell

This is also available in Jupter.
We can add our own commands and icons for this, however there's no way to allow user to cancel the execution.
Today when user runs a cell, they get an individual cancel against each cell, if they run all cells they get a cancel button on the top.

If we (python extension) added our own commands to run the cells, then we'd need our own cancellation icon and I think this would be inconsistent with the current VS Code UI.

Providing at a minimum the VS Code commands such as notebook.cell.executeAllBelow & notebook.cellexecuteAllAbove and allowing extension authors to execute these would be awesome.

@rebornix /cc

[vscodebot]

(Experimental duplicate detection)
Thanks for submitting this issue. Please also check if it is already covered by an existing one, like:

• Execute Notebook(run all cells) does not show progress bar (#93886)
• Notebook: Missing command palette commands (#94098)
• Cell naming feedback (#93933)
• Notebook: Change last cell kind scrolls the editor to top (#93600)
• New markdown or code cell shall be created at the end of the folded cell (#96558)

[roblourens]

We can add these. Yeah it's not currently possible for an extension to implement it, but it should be.

Do you think that instead of using a CancellationToken for cancel, we should have a cancelCell API next to executeCell? That would make this more natural where the extension has declared that a cell is executing, but executeCell has not been called so there is no token available.

Or, the extension could just use executeCommand with the cell execution command ID.

[DonJayamanne]

Or, the extension could just use executeCommand with the cell execution command ID.

Yes, this works perfectly well for us.
This would allow extension authors to execute arbitrary cells, and allow users to cancel execution using the built cancel buttons (next to the cell).

This way we can handle execute cells and below, however the assumption is VS Code would display the cancel buttons next to the cells.

[roblourens]

I think it might be hard for us to implement this, for the same reason that we don't implement "execute notebook" by executing cell individually, but tell the notebook to execute the full notebook. We don't know whether cells can be run in parallel, or whether there's a certain order or other requirements. So I don't know whether it would be unhelpful to add a command that does this out of the box. Will think about it more.

Actually I think we need an API that can execute N particular cells. We might support multiselect and then I will want to tell the extension to execute all selected cells. So we can solve this just by making the execute callback take an array of cells

[rebornix]

• 1 for supporting multiple selections for cell execution

-executeCell(document: NotebookDocument, cell: NotebookCell, token: CancellationToken): Promise<void>;
+executeCell(document: NotebookDocument, cells: NotebookCell[], token: CancellationToken): Promise<void>;

and the same token can be used to cancel the execution. Also if the execution involves multiple cells, we may want to show a cancel button on the editor toolbar to cancel the button.

[DonJayamanne]

No longer required.