Can you template out Notebook contents?

[zachcp]

Thanks again for this great work.

I would like to provide a Notebook with a set of queries pre-populated. Is there currently a way to template out Notebook contents?

[jraymakers]

There isn't any templating support in the notebook currently. What sort of templating are you interested in?

Depending on what you're trying to do, one or more of these DuckDB features may be useful:

• Macros
• Prepared statements
• Variables

[zachcp]

Thank you.

By template here I meant something like a prepopulated notebook. For example to distribute a database as well as a set of precanned queries to explore the data.

I realize the UI code is not open source but i was wondering if there was an API or template system for populating notebook cells

[dtanner]

I'd love to see this feature as well, for the same reason: sharing a notebook of queries for teaching or debugging.
e.g. i'd like to be able to use something like one of these commands:

• cat foo.sql | duckdb -ui
• start_ui(some_sql???);

[jraymakers]

This isn't currently supported directly, but there is an unofficial way to programmatically export and import notebooks: https://gist.github.com/mrjsj/c40fa5ba696da7c96de8fb561e803049

The notebook files are fairly straightforward JSON; you should be able to alter their contents before importing.

[zachcp]

Thats really quite nice. Is there a full list of JSON keys? Looks like:

- version
- notebookSerializationFormat
- currentDatabase
- cells
    - cellId 
    - query
    - useDatabase

[jraymakers]

Those are most of the keys. There's also an optional viewMode at the top level, which appears if you use the "Expand" button on a cell, and also an optional isActive boolean per cell (to track selection).

[rmoff]

Sharing a quick and hacky script I created here, hope that's ok - please delete if not :)
https://rmoff.net/2025/03/19/exporting-notebooks-from-duckdb-ui/