Add interactivity to a function#

This guide addresses how to make your functions interactive by binding widgets to them. This is done with the use of pn.bind, which allows binding the value of a widget to a function or method.

The recommended approach to adding interactivity to your applications is by writing reactive functions or methods. To discover how to write one of these first, we need a function.

Let’s start by creating a function. The function takes an argument number and will return a string of stars equal to the number:

def star_creator(number):
    return "⭐" * number

star_creator(5)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Calling a function repeatedly with different arguments is not very interactive, so as a second step we will create a widget. Here we have chosen the pn.widgets.IntSlider with a value of 5 and a range between 1 and 10:

import panel as pn

pn.extension()

slider = pn.widgets.IntSlider(value=5, start=1, end=10)
slider

To make our star_creator function interactive we can now bind the widget to the function and add it to a layout together with the slider:

interactive_star_creator = pn.bind(star_creator, slider)

pn.Column(slider, interactive_star_creator)

Note

pn.bind works very similarly to Python’s functools.partial, except that it automatically resolves the current value of any widgets, Parameters and other bound functions that are passed as arguments.

Internally the layout will create a so called ParamFunction component to wrap the interactive function. This wrapper component will re-evaluate and update the output whenever the inputs to the function change.

Add interactivity to a function#

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