Introduction

I was working on a Fabric notebook the other day and I needed to know how to get the name of the notebook and workspace my notebook was in so I could send it to some logging. It took me longer than it should have to figure this part out so I thought I would make a post about it so that I didn't have to do that again.

While you can get the notebook name and workspace name this way, you can also use it to get a lot of other information that might be useful to you.

Notebook Utilities

Notebook Utilities, also known as notebookutils, is a library in Fabric that allows you to interact with the Fabric environment. In this blog post I am going to be focusing on one very small but useful aspect of this library which is how to retrieve information about your notebook and workspace.

The main function we are going to use is runtime.context.get(). The main definition of the function looks like the below code.

artifact = notebookutils.runtime.context.get("artifact_name")

Now that we know the definition, we can start retrieving information about our environment by entering in some parameters.

# Get the current notebook name
notebook_name = notebookutils.runtime.context.get("currentNotebookName")

# Get the current workspace name
workspace_name = notebookutils.runtime.context.get("currentWorkspaceName")

display(notebook_name)
display(workspace_name)

You can see more options for "artifacts" can be used by reading the github docs for Fabric. To make things easier, I just copied the list in the table below.

Conclusion

Notebookutils is a great way to retrieve information about your notebook and its environment. You can use this same library to do many other things from restarting your session to copying files. We will explore some of those options in future posts.

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