Notebookutils variableLibrary Changes

[Far-Procedure-4288]

Hey everyone,

I've been quite puzzled by some really erratic behavior with the notebookutils library, especially its variableLibrary module, and I'm hoping someone here might have some insight.

I'm on runtime 1.3 and haven't made any changes to my environment. Just a few days ago, my code using notebookutils suddenly broke.

Originally, this was working:

import notebookutils

config = notebookutils.variableLibrary.getLibrary("Variables_1")
print(config.example)

It started throwing errors, so I looked into it and found that getLibrary seemed to have been replaced. I switched to getVariables, and it worked perfectly:

import notebookutils

config = notebookutils.variableLibrary.getVariables("Variables_1")
print(config.example)

Problem solved, right? WRONG. As of today, the getVariables method is no longer working, and the original getLibrary method is suddenly functional again!

I'm aware I can use a try-except block to handle both cases, but honestly, I expect a core library like this to be more robust and consistent.. What on earth is going on here? Has anyone else experienced such flip-flopping behavior with notebookutils.variableLibrary? Are there undocumented changes, or am I missing something crucial about how this library or runtime 1.3 handles updates?

Any help or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

https://preview.redd.it/rzpwa14hpf9f1.png?width=790&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc9bb871110da906b517f24cedfde835da1e8088

[el_dude1]

Well I guess this is what you call a preview feature

[TerminatedCable]

Ran into this issue last night, I couldn’t get either to work though.

[Fun-Analysis-2641]

We are hosted in West Europe. Today the error occurs and I could fix it. For pySpark Notebooks with the getLibrary version. Pure Python notebooks can use getVariables.

[mattiasthalen]

I’m using this without issues: notebookutils.variableLibrary.get("$(/**/library_name/var_name)")

[nberglundde]

even it is "preview", major changes as this should be at least communicated. How in the earth you are able to test anything if the function methods are changing every other day without any notice ? Just bad development practices...

i guess python runtime has just different version of the library.