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Templates

Often work involves repeating the same proceedure, collecting the same data and performing the same analysis again and again.

This can lead to a lot of copying and pasting, and cause problems when things aren't replicated properly between runs.

Cassini provides templating of Notebooks to help keep proceedures and analysis uniform.

Notebook templates live in the project.template_folder, which is usually in your project's top level directory.

>>> project.template_folder
Path('.../templates')

For each Notebook Tier, you will find a default template in this folder. But you can create your own.

Cassini uses the powerful Jinja2 templating engine.

In short, Python expressions to be used to fill in templates. Regions where Python expressions are to be replaced are wrapped in {{ expression }}.

When creating a new Notebook Tier e.g. WorkPackage, Experiment or Sample, Cassini will pass the newly created tier, including any new meta-data to the notebook with the name tier.

For example, the default template has the form:

from cas_project import project

{{ tier.short_type }} = project.env('{{ tier.name }}')  # (1)!
{{ tier.short_type }}.gui.header()
  1. {{ tier.short_type }} and {{ tier.name }} will be filled in when you create a new tier.

When rendered for a WorkPackage, this replaced tier.short_type with wp and tier.name with the name of whatever tier you just created.

We could add a Markdown Cell with the contents:

# {{ tier.name }}

## started: {{ tier.started }}

> {{ tier.description }}

Meta value = "{{ tier.meta['key'] }}"

Then in the New Child Dialogue

New Child Custom Template

This will then render as:

# WP4
## started: 2024-10-17 15:13:41.622555+00:00

> WP4 Description

Meta value = "value"

You could, for example, create templates that include experimental proceedures, or common analysis scrips.

This concludes the Tutorial.

You might want to check-out more information on customizing Cassini, if you do a lot of coding as part of your work, you might find the official cassini_lib extension useful. If you think you'll be sending lots of notebooks to colleagues and collaborators, you might find the beta sharing features of interest.

Next up is more info on customizing Cassini.

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