The community member is interested in making a notebook react to external changes, such as updates to a dataset, without having to manually refresh the notebook. They would like the notebook to automatically update the analysis and display when the dataset changes.
Another community member suggests using ui.refresh, but notes that it would be preferable to have a solution that doesn't require polling. A third community member mentions that they have considered adding a feature to watch a file and automatically refresh the notebook when the file is updated, but this is not currently available.
There is no explicitly marked answer in the comments.
Is it possible to make a notebook react to external changes? I would like to have a notebook that shows the status of an experiment and displays some analysis, but then to update it as the dataset changes. I don't mind if I have to write some code that runs in the background and notifies the notebook that a cell needs to be re-computed.
We have thought about adding contents = mo.filename('path/to/file') which will watch and refresh with updates (currently in a old branch of mine). we don't have this yet, and ui.refresh might be your best bet at the moment.