Access and Manipulate the URL

This guide addresses how to access and manipulate the URL.

This powerful technique enables you to save the state of your app via the url. You can bookmark the URL or share the URL with friends or colleagues to open the app in the exact same state later.

Access

When starting a server session Panel will attach a Location component which can be accessed using pn.state.location. The Location component serves a number of functions:

• Navigation between pages via pathname

• Sharing (parts of) the page state in the url as search parameters for bookmarking and sharing.

• Navigating to subsections of the page via the hash_ parameter.

Core

• pathname (string): pathname part of the url, e.g. ‘/how_to/layout/spacing.html’.

• search (string): search part of the url e.g. ‘?color=blue’.

• hash_ (string): hash part of the url e.g. ‘#margin-parameter’.

• reload (bool): Whether or not to reload the page when the url is updated.

  • For independent apps this should be set to True.

  • For integrated or single page apps this should be set to False.

Readonly

• href (string): The full url, e.g. ‘https://panel.holoviz.org:443/how_to/layout/spacing.html?color=blue#margin-parameter’.

• protocol (string): protocol part of the url, e.g. ‘http:’ or ‘https:’

• port (string): port number, e.g. ‘80’

Note

In a notebook environment pn.state.location is not initialized until the first plot has been displayed

Manipulate

By default the current query parameters in the URL (specified as a URL suffix such as ?color=blue) are made available on pn.state.location.query_params.

Sync and Unsync

To make working with query parameters straightforward the Location object provides a sync method which allows syncing query parameters with the parameters on a Parameterized object.

We will start by defining a Parameterized class:

import panel as pn
import param


class Settings(param.Parameterized):
    integer = param.Integer(default=1, bounds=(0, 10))
    string = param.String(default='A string')

    dont_sync = param.String(default='A string')

Now we will use the pn.state.location object to sync it with the URL query string. The sync method takes the Parameterized class or instance to sync with as the first argument and a list or dictionary of the parameters as the second argument. If a dictionary is provided it should map from the Parameterized object’s parameters to the query parameter name in the URL:

settings = Settings()

pn.state.location.sync(settings, {'integer': 'int', 'string': 'str'})

Now the Parameterized object is bi-directionally linked to the URL query parameter.

Lets try to serve it as an app

pn.Param(settings).servable()

Note to unsync the Parameterized object you can simply call pn.state.location.unsync(query_example).

Related Resources