Secure interactive input a la getpass

[bohdanszymanik]

Description

Is there a way to get masked input data entry from the user of the notebook equivalent to the Python kernal getpass capability?

import getpass
password = getpass.getpass()

Known workarounds

[cgravill]

This probably requires an implementation of #126 for us to support getpass style interactions. It'd be great to cover this approach.

The closest approach I've used is storing secrets in a separate .fsx so they're not displayed, is that possible for what you need?

[bohdanszymanik]

It would if I have the ability to edit a separate .fsx file - but I've been trying out the azure f# notebooks. I wonder if I have the ability to create a separate .fsx and access it from within the azure notebook environment. I'll take a look...

[dsyme]

@cgravill @bohdanszymanik @sylvanc I think we really need to do #126 to have Azure Notebooks F# support be "complete"

[bohdanszymanik]

I can provide some background on the use case here - I'm currently part of a project involved in tertiary sector fund management - lots of potential examples of data analysis to support that investment - in particular I was looking at outliers where we might want to investigate further. Thought I could host some of the anonymised datasets in azure and then use f# as part of the tooling to prep data, analyse and present - but the people I'd be showing this too would really want the widget controls to help them participate in the analysis.

[cgravill]

Ah interesting use case. It's certainly possible to load a separate .fsx, it's just F# Interactive underneath. So you can:

However, in the hosted scenario then Azure Notebooks are going to cleanup your directories. So you'd have to put it back either using e.g. the Dropbox import or write it with another notebook every time you restart. That's pretty clunky but might work for now? There's some information and pointer to an example notebook for getting Azure data on https://notebooks.azure.com/faq

I'd very much like us to support interactive widgets as that would make this work far better and enable the interactive exploration of data. I'm not aware of anyone working on this yet though.