API: should ``Layer()`` not derive from ``BaseObject``?

Since Layer is the main interface, it would be nice if tab completion on the object only listed relevant pieces of the API so that you can quickly find what plot types are available (e.g. point(), bar(), text(), etc.)

Currently, since it derives from BaseObject the namespace is polluted with all sorts of traitlet stuff that the user probably doesn’t care about.

I’d propose something like this:

class LayerObject(BaseObject):
    # traitlet-related stuff goes here
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(LayerObject, self).__init__(**kwargs)

    # etc.

class Layer(object):
    # non-traitlet-related Layer methods here
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if len(args)==1:
            self.data = args[0]
        self._layerobject = LayerObject(**kwargs)

    def point(self):
        self.mark = 'point'
        return self

    # etc.

The only problem would be if we ever want to pass Layer to some other class this would complicate things. What do you think?

[ellisonbg]

I don’t feel too strongly about the ordering but like the idea of being consistent with the vegalite examples. So +1 to marking first

Sent from my iPhone

On May 20, 2016, at 9:44 AM, Kanit Wongsuphasawat [e-mail] wrote:

To be clear, either order works currently.

Yep. I mean, unless you have strong preference, can we put mark_point() before encode() in the all the example so we can establish convention? (For the same reason, in all VL examples, we put mark before encoding although order does not really matter in JSON. 😃 )

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[jakevdp]

I imagine that as we hit other pain points in configuration, we can come up with more API solutions similar to mark_point(color='red'). I landed on this as I went through the basic examples and tried to implement them in Altair. I don’t know what the right solution will be as we go deeper into configs, but I believe that API-wise, exactly mirroring the VegaLite spec should not be our preferred solution.